An Outline of Wells 




H. G. WELLS 

From a Drawing by J. Simpson 

Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Newnes 



An Outline of Wells 

The Superman in the Street 



By 

Sidney Dark 

Editor of John O' London's Weekly 



With an Introduction by 

Heywood Broun 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Gbe -ftntcfeerbocfeer press 

1922 



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Copyright, 1922 

by 

Sidney Dark 

Made in the United States of America 



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AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

For years I longed to meet Wells, but in some- 
what the same way that I longed to go up in an 
aeroplane. The possibility that terror might kill 
the fun was always in my mind. When he came 
to America he proved to be less awe-inspiring than 
even a little army with banners. Fortunately, he 
was somewhat whittled down by the fact that his 
mission was journalism. After all we were both 
newspaper men. The executives of "The Morning 
World" referred to him as "our junior reporter" 
and he accepted the title with an air which was 
whimsical and yet a little proud. Still, even as a 
cub reporter Wells remained somewhat too dazzling 
for my comfort. "This is Mr. Wells," said Herbert 
Swope as he swung around a corner of the office 
labyrinth towing his latest contributor. All the 
copyreaders on our paper are bigger than Wells 
and the executive editor can give him three octaves 
handicap any evening and roar him down, but to me 



AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

his journalistic job could not hide the magnificent 
and disconcerting fact that this was the man who 
had done a history of Mr. Polly and, later, of the 
world. I felt a little sorry that my distant ances- 
tors, in accordance with the Wellsian plan, had 
contrived to crawl up out of the ooze and begin 
a simple life upon the beaches. My line should have 
remained under water until I was more callous to 
the presence of celebrities. I could not forget that 
Wells had practically flicked Cleopatra out of his- 
tory with a little finger, stooped low to look at 
Csesar, and thumbed his nose at Napoleon. And 
so I bowed and ran back to the private office which 
I share with four other men. 

These reminiscences are not entirely irrelevant 
because among other things Wells has a funda- 
mental geniality and common humanity. This may 
not be altogether necessary to the man of genius but 
it is distinctive. In proof of his possession of these 
qualities I offer in evidence the fact that a week 
later I was boldly asking, "Mr. Wells, who are the 
five greatest living writers in England?" or some 
other question equally foolish and statistical. And 
he answered. It was about that time that I sat and 
heard another newspaper man from the "World" (an 
exalted one but no matter) cut into the middle of an 



AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

answer which Wells was making to some Japanese 
and take up the burden of talk by remarking, "I 
think Mr. Wells means to say — " He proceeded 
to amplify and clarify the words of his junior re- 
porter. There were no casualties. Possibly Wells 
has no liking for the role of the great man. He 
never played it here during the Arms Conference. 

Sidney Dark in his "Outline of Wells" develops 
the importance of the likeness of Wells to his fel- 
lows. It is one of the chief points to be made in 
rebuttal against those critics who insist that here 
is merely another demonstration of a messianic com- 
plex. Wells has never swept down into the world 
from any mountain top ready with revelation. He 
preaches from no higher level than a curbstone. 
The rest of us can hop up and follow his suggestions 
if we choose. 

I am inclined to agree with Sidney Dark that 
Wells is not all artist. As in the career of Shaw 
there has been a constant bickering in his soul be- 
tween the artist and the propagandist. In the 
last ten years not very much of his work seems to 
have been inspired merely by a disposition to kick 
up his heels. That is what I mean by art. The 
feud between it and propaganda is inevitable and 
practically irreconcilable. But a time has come 



AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

when it is worth while to pause and consider which 
is the more important. For centuries mankind has 
assumed, without thinking, that the person with 
something to say must of necessity yield place to 
the man intent only upon musical interludes. "I'm 
a fiddler" has seemed sufficient answer from any 
idle bystander in a burning world. It isn't enough. 
When civilisation crumbles art goes with it. So- 
ciety must be far more stable than it is to-day before 
the sheer stylist can lord it over the rest of his 
fellows. 

In granting that Wells is not all artist, I do not 
mean that his literary work is any the less engross- 
ing. "Joan and Peter" ought to shake all America 
out of its present educational traditions and yet 
the book provides one of the most engrossing stories 
which I know. Cain's heresy is the orthodoxy of 
the simon pure artist. He must steadfastly decline 
the job of being his brother's keeper. The artist 
of Gomorrah went right on with his sculpture, his 
poetry, or his painting heedless and indifferent to 
civic conditions. When the doom came it did not 
pass his door. 

Wells is no neutral. Even in his novels he be- 
comes a passionate partisan. He strengthens the 
arm and the arguments of the right characters 
viii 



AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

against the wrong ones. In "The Undying Fire" 
the motor of the god in the machine is never stilled. 
Once in a review I remarked that Galsworthy's pas- 
sion for balance irritated me. He brings to drama 
and fiction a recurring message of, "There is much 
to be said on both sides." A draw does not dis- 
satisfy him. "We feel," I remember writing, "like 
shouting at Galsworthy, 'For heaven's sake take 
your coat off and get into it.' " To which Keith 
Preston remarked a week later, "Yes, and in read- 
ing Wells, I sometimes want to say for heaven's 
sake keep your shirt on." 

There has never been a moment in which Wells 
has not been willing to intrepret art as something 
big enough and democratic enough to have room 
within its scope for a plan to save the world or any 
corner of it. Art has not been able to terrify him 
from searching for another king even though an 
invisible one. He took up the attitude of the liberal 
toward the war and novelised it. The necessity of 
a new and more enlightened attitude toward educa- 
tion inspired him with a story. He has not been 
content to remain aloof in a tower within an ugly 
world and turn his thoughts to nothing but beauty. 
Indeed one might almost say that Wells has re- 
vived the parable and endeavoured to make it an 



AN AMERICAN FOREWORD 

art form. Perhaps, only one other has excelled 
Wells in the pertinence of parables. And those of 
Wells are a good deal longer 

Heywood Broun. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



H. G. Wells ..... Frontispiece 

Joseph Conrad 16 

Arnold Bennett 32 

Anatole France 42 

G. K. Chesterton 48 

Hilaire Belloc ........ 106 

H. G. Wells ........ 154 



An Outline of Wells 



An Outline of Wells 

CHAPTER ONE 

A short, stocky man with a scrubby moustache 
and a high-pitched voice; a man nearer sixty than 
fifty but looking considerably younger; a man 
whose like you can see a thousand times a day in 
every city's streets. Such, superficially, is H. G. 
Wells whom Anatole France has recently described 
— and accurately described — as the greatest intel- 
lectual force in the English-speaking world. 

The weakness of most supermen is their unlike- 
ness to their fellows and this unlikeness is often 
quite as obvious physically as it is mentally and 
morally. You cannot meet Bernard Shaw, without 
realising at once that he is not as other men. There 
is something strange and unusual about him. You 
guess at once that he eats differently and drinks 
differently, thinks differently and dreams differ- 
ently from the rest of us. The aspirations of such 
a man, his admonitions and his doctrines are in- 
3 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

tensely interesting but their importance to the 
world is limited by his detachment from his fellows. 

Intellectually, of course, H. G. Wells is im- 
mensely superior to the common run of men. He is 
a born leader and inspirer of men and — this is the 
point of outstanding importance — he remains a 
man of like passions with ourselves. Shaw and 
most of the intellectuals belong to a class apart. 
They generally recognise their separation from the 
crowd and glory in it. The intellectual habitually 
stands at the street corners and thanks God that he 
is not as other men. The glory of Bunyan and 
Charles Dickens is that they stood at the street 
corners and thanked God that they were as other 
men. Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He 
does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He 
has never been able to realise that even in mean 
streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs es- 
sentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower 
middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the 
people. And this is the fact that gives him his 
peculiar importance in the modern world. 

Arnold Bennett springs from the same class. But 

there is a vast- spiritual difference between the two 

men. Bennett writes with composure. Wells 

writes with enthusiasm. Bennett is a critic. Wells 

4 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

is a crusader. Bennett is a conscious literary artist 
who has been vastly influenced by the great French 
masters. Wells uses his pen to "bash away at the 
minxes." His genius compels the world to listen 
to him, and the world listens the more attentively 
because his is not the voice of a visitor from Mars, 
but of a superman in the street. 

H. G. Wells was born in 1866. He has him- 
self written the story of his early years. 

I was born in that queer indefinite class that 
we call in England the middle class. I am not 
a bit aristocratic; I do not know any of my 
ancestors beyond my grandparents, and about 
them I do not know very much, because I am 
the youngest son of my father and mother, and 
their parents were all dead before I was born. 

My mother was the daughter of an inn- 
keeper at a place named Midhurst, who sup- 
plied post horses to the coaches before the 
railways came; my father was the son of the 
head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst 
Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of 
fortune and position; for most of his life my 
father kept a little shop in a suburb of London, 
and eked out his resources by playing a game 
called cricket, which is not only a pastime, but 
a show which people will pay to see, and which, 
therefore, affords a living for professional 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

players. His shop was unsuccessful, and my 
mother, who had once been a lady's maid, be- 
came, when I was twelve years old, housekeeper 
in a large country house. 

I, too, was destined to be a shopkeeper. I 
left school at thirteen for that purpose. I was 
apprenticed first to be a chemist, and, that 
proving unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after 
a year or so it became evident to me that 
the facilities for higher education that were 
and still are constantly increasing in Eng- 
land, offered me better chances in life than 
a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; 
and so I struggled for and got various grants 
and scholarships that enabled me to study and 
to take a degree in science and some mediocre 
honours in the new and now great and growing 
University of London. 

After I had graduated I taught biology for 
two or three years and then became a journalist, 
partly because it is a more remunerative profes- 
sion in England than teaching, but partly also 
because I had always taken the keenest interest 
in writing English. Some little kink in my 
mind had always made the writing of prose very 
interesting to me. 

I began first to write literary articles, criti- 
cisms, and so forth, and presently short imagina- 
tive stories in which I made use of the teeming 
suggestions of modern science. There is a 
6 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

considerable demand for this sort of fiction in 
Great Britain and America, and my first book, 
"The Time Machine," published in 1895, at- 
tracted considerable attention; and with two of 
its successors, "The War of the Worlds" and 
"The Invisible Man," gave me a sufficient pop- 
ularity to enable me to devote myself exclu- 
sively, and with a certain sense of security, to 
purely literary work. 

This is a strikingly candid autobiography. To 
it there is little to be added except that at the be- 
ginning of his literary career, Wells was one of the 
many distinguished young writers who received 
priceless help and encouragement from William 
Ernest Henley. 

Despite the war and despite democratic progress, 
"gentlemanliness" remains one of England's curses. 
The traditional manners, prejudices and habits of 
the well-to-do, carefully cultivated at the great 
universities, still dominate English life. The Eng- 
lishman who is not a gentleman is heavily handi- 
capped in whatever vocation he may choose. Con- 
sequently, everybody who is eager for position, 
and everybody who has something to say and wants 
Englishmen to listen to him, carefully cultivates 
gentlemanliness if he has not been lucky enough to 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

inherit it. The most gentlemanly men in England 
are the leaders of the Labour Party in the House of 
Commons. Socialists save their money to send their 
sons to a "good" public school and afterwards to 
Oxford. One of the leaders of the Communist Party 
in England is a most gentlemanly gentleman. 

Thackeray is the typical gentleman in literature. 
He was so gentlemanly that he deplored his pos- 
session of literary genius and continually regretted 
that he did not belong to a really gentlemanly 
profession. Dickens was never a gentleman in the 
true "gentlemanly" sense. Nor is Wells. 

So widespread is the worship of gentility that I 
half fear Wells may regard this statement as an 
insult. It is intended as a compliment. He is too 
unrestrained, too individual, too fearlessly candid 
to fit into the gentleman pattern. Wells admires 
many of the aristocratic virtues, particularly cour- 
age, but he invariably endows common persons with 
these virtues. To me, there is nothing more heart- 
ening in contemporary life than that the son of a 
professional cricketer should be acclaimed the 
greatest intellectual force in the English-speaking 
world at the same time that the son of a Welsh peas- 
ant is compelling great English lords and commer- 
cial magnates to dance to his pipe. 
8 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Fiction is oftener the creator of fact. The 
novelist who is of any real account is first of all the 
recorder of the spiritual drama of contemporary 
life. But while he is recording the present he may 
be inspiring the future. In his study of Ibsen and 
the Ibsen dramas, Janko Lavrin says: 

Art is a symbolical diary of mankind's inner 
evolution. The history of art is the history of 
mankind's soul. For each epoch bequeaths its 
soul to future generations mainly through its 
art. An artistic creator is thus the best witness 
to his own time. He is highly contemporary, in 
so far as the soul of his time finds in him its 
most intense, its synthetic expression. But the 
more he feels the secret pulse of his era the 
greater is the burden he has to sustain — since 
everyone who is profoundly sensitive to his own 
epoch is for this very reason spiritually also in 
advance of it, and, therefore, usually suffers 
from it, judges it, and, in some way or other, 
reacts against it. Hence, the importance of an 
artist's individual attitude towards the vital 
values of his epoch. 

That is to say, the man whose sensitive imagina- 
tion enables him to have a deep knowledge of the 
life of his own day is necessarily the man who is 
9 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

shaping the life of the days that will follow. The 
artist (particularly the literary artist) has affected 
the history of mankind (and the history of mankind 
has precious little to do with the exploits of Kings 
and Parliaments) far more than the statesman and 
the soldier. 

Sometimes the influence is very subtle and is 
exercised without any intention on the part of the 
artist himself. Ibsen, for example, not only revo- 
lutionised the European theatre but had an im- 
mense effect on the development of European 
thought. But Ibsen always protested that he was 
nothing but an artist and was vehemently rude to 
the Norwegian ladies who proposed to erect a 
statue in his honour as an acknowledgment of his 
services to the feminist cause. 

Wells is a very different man. He has a genius 
for story telling but his novels have two very ob- 
vious purposes. The first purpose is to demon- 
strate some futility, some inane wastefulness, some 
unnecessary limitation of happiness and develop- 
ment consequent on the conventions, the customs 
and the laws of contemporary life. Each of his 
considerable novels is a crusade, a demonstration 
of wicked folly at which both the humanist and the 
scientist in Wells equally revolt. 
10 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

But the Wells novels are more than the bashings 
of a crusader. They are chapters in an elaborate 
intellectual and spiritual autobiography. It is an 
accepted fact that Bernard Shaw is the hero, when 
he is not the heroine, of every one of his plays. 
Wells cannot be directly identified with his charac- 
ters as Shaw can be, but in most of his novels the 
leading character represents a phase of the author's 
development. 

The difference between the two men is that Shaw 
is always the same Shaw. The Shavian attitude to 
life has remained consistent. The philosophy of 
"Widowers' Houses" is practically the same as the 
philosophy of "Heartbreak House." The joy of 
Wells is that he is never the same. Each day brings 
for him some new adventure and some new dis- 
covery. 

His intellectual honesty is unqualified. When he 
has once abandoned a creed he will demonstrate its 
futility with an enthusiasm equal to that with which 
he defended it. His instinct for truth is so great 
that, at its call, he has never hesitated to sacrifice 
the himself of yesterday. Isaac Wells is always 
offering Abraham Wells as a sacrifice to the Gods. 

Mr. H. L. Mencken protests, in his characteris- 
tic caustic fashion, that Wells, the crusader, has de- 
ll 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

stroyed Wells, the literary artist, and that the man 
as artist is now extinct "after a process of gradual 
obscure decay." I agree with Mr. Mencken that 
Wells has shown himself "the most brilliant if not 
always the most profound of contemporary English 
novelists," but he has never been a conscious liter- 
ary artist. He said, himself, in a letter to Henry 
James : "To you literature, like painting, is an end, 
to me literature, like architecture, is a means, it 
has a use." 

The use that Wells has made of literature is to 
demonstrate the unscientific futilities of modern 
life. Sometimes he has employed autobiographical 
novels as his means of demonstration. He was im- 
pelled to the novel, as he has confessed, by the fact 
that novel writing is a financially profitable em- 
ployment, by the fact that the novel provides him 
with a far larger audience than the tract, by the fact 
that he has a genius for story telling, and by the fact 
that he finds immense pleasure in writing about 
himself. Sometimes he has used the essay. Re- 
cently, in that marvellous achievement "The Outline 
of History," he has used historical narrative. But 
whatever means he has employed, the deliberate 
end has always been the same. Wells is a man 
with a mission. The object of the mission and the 
12 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

subject of the sermon have not always been quite 
the same, but the man himself has always been a 
preacher. 

Mr. Mencken says that Wells "suffers from a 
messianic delusion and once a man begins to suffer 
from a messianic delusion his days as a serious 
artist are ended." But Mr. Mencken is also suffer- 
ing from a delusion in supposing that Wells first 
put on the messianic robe in 1912. He was wearing 
it ostentatiously fifteen years earlier. His own 
declaration of the function of the novelist is the 
sufficient proof that, as he suggested to Henry 
James, art means "every conscious human activity." 
He has never in his life sat down to write a novel 
with the ambition that has influenced men like 
Henry James, George Moore, Joseph Conrad or 
Flaubert. 

He has written about life. He has created 
dozens of actual characters. He has exhibited his 
own personality under various fascinating guises, 
but he has never been interested in the drama that 
occurs from the crash of personalities, and rarely 
interested, as Joseph Conrad is always interested, in 
the dramatic struggle of the individual with the 
eternal forces of the world. Wells is interested in 
the fight of the individual against the conditions of 
13 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

modern society. This peculiar interest is evidenced 
in his famous declaration of the subjects with which 
a novelist may rightly deal. 

We are going to write, subject only to our 
own limitations, about the whole of human life. 
We are going to deal with political questions 
and social questions. We cannot present people 
unless we have this free hand, this unrestricted 
field. What is the good of telling stories about 
people's lives if one may not deal freely with 
the religious beliefs and organisations that have 
controlled or failed to control them ? 

What is the good of pretending to write 
about love and the loyalties and treacheries and 
quarrels of men and women if one must not 
glance at those varieties of physical tempera- 
ment and organic quality, those deeply passion- 
ate needs and distresses from which half the 
storms of human life are brewed? We are 
going to write about it all. We are going to 
write about business and finance and politics 
and precedents and pretentiousness and deco- 
rum and indecorum until a thousand pretences 
and ten thousand impostors shrivel in the cold 
clear air of our elucidations. 

Here there is no nonsense about art for art's 
sake. Here there is a clear assertion that the novel- 
14 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ist has a mission. Here there is a definite separa- 
tion from the mere artist. Here too there is a 
significant confession. It is business and social 
prejudice and politics and particularly machinery 
with which Mr. Wells is interested and not the 
minute study of the hopeless struggles of men with 
life and with themselves that has absorbed the in- 
terest of most of the world's great poets and 
novelists. In "Kipps" and "The History of Mr. 
Polly" it is the soul of man struggling against the 
petty stupidities of English retail shops. In 
"Tono -Bungay" it is the soul of man struggling 
against the dishonest stupidity of a commercial 
system built on grotesque advertising. In "Anne 
Veronica" it is the soul of man struggling against 
the stupidity of the family. Always the individual 
is in the meshes not of fate but of folly. 

In these introductory pages, I am endeavouring 
definitely to "place" the man about whom I am 
writing. I am endeavouring in broad generalisa- 
tions, which I shall subsequently develop, to answer 
the question "Whom went ye out for to see?" The 
answer is a crusader, a fierce critic of his own 
generation, a man with a mission, a preacher with 
a gospel which he has arrived at after many experi- 
ments and after embracing and abandoning many 
15 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

creeds. The answer, too, is a man with a vehement 
personality, with amazing courage, with a compre- 
hensive understanding of contemporary life, with 
such a genius for expression and such red hot pur- 
pose that the placid Henry James was moved to 
write to him: "You stand out intensely vivid and 
alone, making nobody else signify at all." 

He is, as I have said, superficially undistin- 
guished in appearance, but this want of distinction 
disappears immediately one begins to talk to him. 
His whole being quivers with energy. His grasp 
on life is amazingly comprehensive. His criticisms, 
his denunciations, his theories, are all his own and 
are heaped up in an inexhaustible intellectual store- 
house. Wells is always "keen." Whatever he does, 
he does with all his might. At his pleasant country 
house in Essex, he plays hockey and other games 
(some of which he has invented for himself) with 
exactly the same zest as he has in attacking folly 
and preaching the way of salvation. Like all 
humanists (or nearly all) Wells has humour, humour 
enough anyway to realise that he is not always 
right. His humour finds expression in the odd little 
pen and ink drawings that he gives to his friends 
(the public can find specimens in "Boon") and in 
the pretty lines he writes in the copies of his books 
16 




JOSEPH CONRAD 
Reproduced by permission of "John O'London's Weekly' 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

that he gives away. He is a man with many de- 
tractors and many friends — and among his friends 
are more women than men. 

My friend, E. T. Raymond, the author of "Un- 
censored Celebrities" says of Wells: 

Both by temperament and by conviction, Mr. 
H. G. Wells is a good hater; a fairly complete 
philosophy of hatred as a useful element in life 
could, indeed, be distilled from his works. Mr. 
Wells has been described as the sworn foe of 
Things as They Are. But not less remarkable 
is his detestation of Things as They Were. 
Things and men — for he has the rather rare 
capacity (Macaulay had it also in a lesser de- 
gree) of hating fiercety — as if they still lived 
next door — people whose dust has for ages 
mingled with the soil of far-distant lands. 

In the matter of Mr. Wells's animosities a 
thousand years are but as a day. He hates 
Constantine. He hates Caesar and most of the 
Romans. He hates Alexander. He detests 
Demosthenes as he might "Pertinax" to-day or 
Count Westarp the day before yesterday. The 
only "old 'uns" (to quote Mr. Durdles) to 
whom he is any way partial are a few rather 
vague Chinamen and Indians. But chiefly he 
loathes a certain kind of early-Christian Father, 
represented by that "little, red-haired, busy, 
17 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

wirepulling" person whom the Church honours 
as Saint Athanasius. 



My purpose in this book is to summarise Wells's 
message to his own generation and to discover the 
actual man from the books that he has written. I 
do not profess that this second task is very difficult. 
In that masterly book, "The Man Shakespeare," 
Mr. Frank Harris succeeded in discovering Shake- 
speare, the most impersonal of artists, from the 
Shakespeare plays. Wells is an easy discovery. 
He scorns to be impersonal. He is always giving 
himself away. Precise literary criticism is no part 
of my task. It is certainly true, as Ford Madox 
Hueffer has said, that Wells "writes without the 
help of any aesthetic laws." Sometimes he writes 
admirably well. Sometimes he writes clumsily. 
Wells is a volcano and volcanoes rarely vomit out 
their lava according to the rules. His style horrified 
Henry James who wrote of "its weakness and 
looseness, the utter going by the board of every 
self respect of composition and expression." But 
Wells has so much to say that he is naturally more 
concerned with matter than with manner. 

It is not easy briefly to summarise the Wells 
philosophy owing to the habitual development of 
18 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

mind and to a certain insistent waywardness which 
he has himself acknowledged. In the preface 
to the 1914 edition of "Anticipations" he says: 
"An occasional turn of harshness and moments 
of leaping ignorance are in the blood of H. G. 
Wells." 

On the title page of "The New Machiavelli," 
Wells quotes Professor William James's asser- 
tion that tender-minded and tough-minded people 
do both exist. Wells himself is certainly to be 
numbered with the tough-minded, but his tough- 
mindedness is qualified by a measure, perhaps one 
should say a large measure, of sentimentality. 
This sentimentality is to be traced to his origin. 
It is the mark of the English middle class and no one 
born into that class can ever quite escape from it. 
There are passages in almost all the Wells novels 
of an almost Dickensian sentimentality. Take for 
example the scene between Isabel and Remington 
towards the end of "The New Machiavelli." It 
is a question whether the woman has the man all 
to herself or whether he continues a brilliantly 
promising political career. 

"I am going to make a scene," she said, 
"and get this over, I am so discontented and 
19 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

miserable; I've got to tell you. It would 
come between us if I didn't. I am in love 
with you, with everything — with all my brains. 
I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, never 
you fear. But to-day I am crying out with all 
my being. This election — you're going up; 
you're going on. In these papers — you're a 
great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. 
At the back of my mind I've always had the 
idea I was going to have you somehow presently 
for myself — I mean to have you to go long 
tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals 
for, to watch for of an evening." 

And so on and so on. The speech itself is unreal 
and sentimental. It, at once, suggests that the 
man will finally give up his career in order to go 
long tramps with the woman, which he actu- 
ally does in the novel, but which he would not do 
in real life. It is these lapses into English middle 
class sentimentality that qualify Wells's tough- 
mindedness but which at the same time have 
their importance in proving that he is a genuine 
representative of his nation and his age despite his 
pre-eminent intelligence and originality. 

Disregarding unessentials and disregarding 
abandoned faiths and phases that have passed, it 
may be said that Wells has continually insisted 
20 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

that the human mind is the final and culminating 
achievement of creation and that by right think- 
ing and right thinking alone can the world be 
saved. In "The Outline of History" he says: 

The history of our race for the last few 
thousand years is no more than a history of 
the development and succession of states of 
mind and of acts arising from them. 

To Wells, evil, suffering, sin are the conse- 
quences of stupidity and want of judgment. To 
think rightly is to act rightly. Utopia can only 
be reached along the road of common-sense. Gil- 
bert Chesterton continually insists that this is a 
funny world. Thomas Hardy continually de- 
plores that this is a tragically sad world. Anatole 
France regards the world as utterly, hopelessly 
meaningless. Wells looks out on the world and 
is perplexed and enraged by the stupidity that he 
discovers all around him. 

Sometimes, he has his moods of despair. Some- 
times he feels that stupidity has bitten so deep into 
the life of man that it can never be eradicated and 
that there is no real chance for the triumph of wis- 
dom, happiness and virtue. This mood finds ex- 
pression in the striking speech put into the mouth 
21 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

of Kipps: "I tell you we're in a blessed drain pipe 
and we've got to crawl along it till we die." 

Sometimes Wells believes in the ultimate vic- 
tory of common-sense over conventional stupidity 
as when he allows Mr. Polly to escape from indi- 
gestion and a nagging wife to easy happiness with 
the comfortably fat landlady of the Potwell Inn. 
He has definitely proclaimed himself an optimist 
in "New Worlds for Old." 

Though the writer is neither a very strong 
nor a very healthy nor a very successful per- 
son, though he find much unattainable and 
much to regret, yet life presents itself to him 
more and more with every year as a spectacle 
of inexhaustible interest, of unfolding and in- 
tensifying beauty, and as a splendid field for 
high attempts and stimulating desires. Yet 
none the less is it a spectacle shot strangely 
with pain, with mysterious insufficiencies and 
cruelties, with pitfalls into anger and regret, 
with aspects unaccountably sad. Its most ex- 
alted moments are most fraught for him with 
the appeal for endeavour, with the urgency of 
unsatisfied wants. These shadows and pains 
and instabilities do not, to his sense at least, 
darken the whole prospect; it may be indeed 
that they intensify its splendours to his per- 
ceptions; yet all these evil ugly aspects of life 
22 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

come to him with an effect of challenge, as 
something not to be ignored but passionately 
disputed, as an imperative call for whatever 
effort and courage lurk in his composition. 
Life and the world are fine, but not as an abid- 
ing place; as an arena. 

I do not think it would be possible to find in 
any of Wells's books a more satisfactory sum- 
mary of his relation to the world. He is a 
first-class fighting man and life is a good thing 
because it gives the first-class fighting man con- 
tinual opportunity for exciting struggle and in- 
sistent battle. Wells goes out into the arena of life 
tremendously sure of himself, perfectly confident 
that, for whatever cause he may be fighting at the 
moment, his cause must be pre-eminently right, 
quite sure of victory and equally confident that he is 
armed with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon 
and that his opponents are the children of dark- 
ness. With his head held high and with a brilliant 
pennon at his lance head, he joyously rides to bat- 
tle with what Henry James has called "the easy 
impudence of genius." 



23 



CHAPTER TWO 

Before beginning the discovery of Wells from 
the Wells novels, it will be worth while to con- 
tinue the endeavour to "place" him by compari- 
sons with some of his most conspicuous 
contemporaries. It is inevitable that the first 
comparison should be with Bernard Shaw. Both 
writers claim to be students of science as well as 
literary artists. Both men are interested in soci- 
ology and profess and call themselves Socialists. 
Both men love to talk about themselves, and are, 
in a sense, the chief protagonists of their novels 
and their plays. Both men are combative, asser- 
tive, and immensely sure of themselves. 

As I have pointed out, one fundamental differ- 
ence between Wells and Shaw is that while Wells 
is a fellow of infinite change, Shaw always remains 
the same Shaw. The consequence is that, while 
Wells is always up to date, Shaw has now become 
hopelessly out of date. 

A literary epoch came to an end on August 
24 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

fourth, 1914. Shaw has never contrived to get 
into the new epoch. He has used the war as a 
proof that he has always been right. Wells con- 
fesses that the war has proved that he has very 
often been wrong. Shaw is a philosophic Bour- 
bon. He has learned nothing from the greatest 
convulsion in modern history. Wells was com- 
pelled by the war to reconsider almost every 
proposition that before the autumn of 1914 he had 
accepted as true, and to modify many of his pre- 
war opinions. 

"Heartbreak House," the latest of the Shaw 
plays to be produced in London, is an extraordi- 
narily amusing and witty commentary on English 
life, but it is a commentary on a life which is dead 
and gone, not on the life that has been created by 
the war and by the industrial chaos that has 
followed the war. 

The second distinction between Wells and Shaw 
is that Wells is English and Shaw is not. Shaw 
has always been particularly anxious to insist 
that he has no sort of connection with "leprechaun 
Ireland" — the Ireland of fairies and fantasy, the 
Ireland of Synge and Lady Gregory, the Ireland 
of Father Keegan, the poet priest in his own "John 
Bull's Other Island." 

25 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

In the days when the Gaelic League was first 
arousing the nationalist enthusiasm which led to 
the Sinn Fein movement and to the creation of 
the Irish Free State, most of the Irish literary 
men settled in England shook the dust of Lon- 
don off their feet and hurried to take up their 
residence in Dublin. Mr. George Moore followed 
Mr. W. B. Yeats across the Irish Channel, though 
his stay in Dublin was a short one and he was soon 
forced to confess that he preferred the Anglo- 
Saxon flesh pots of the West End of London to 
the dull provincialism of the Irish capital. Shaw 
never made the journey. He was asked by an 
interviewer whether he intended to take up his 
residence in Dublin and he replied: "Not while 
I can find a comfortable residence in St. Helena." 

Shaw belongs to the class, not a very large class, 
perhaps, but a definite one, of "denationalised 
Irishmen" and the "denationalised Irishman" is 
one of the very few people who have ever suc- 
ceeded in having no country of their own. His 
soul may not be dead but he can never say: "This 
is my own, my native land!" All Shaw's criti- 
cisms, therefore, of social conventions and national 
prejudices must be considered with the fact that 
he has no country and no children. 
26 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Wells is definitely English and definitely middle 
class English. His is not the voice of one crying 
aloud in the wilderness but the voice of one crying 
aloud in a city street, amid the turmoil of a crowd 
made up of his own blood relations. 

Further, while both Wells and Shaw appear to 
be equally anxious to give themselves away, Shaw 
has really spent his ironic genius in creating a false 
Shaw, as has been well said, "as legendary a per- 
son as the Flying Dutchman," while Wells has 
always told the truth about himself at the particu- 
lar moment at which he was writing. 

Wells, being an Englishman, is really a simple 
person. Shaw, being a "denationalised Irish- 
man," is an intensely subtle person, joying in 
constructing an elaborate mask, behind which to 
hide his own features. 

The last essential point of difference between 
the two men is that Shaw is a Puritan and that 
Wells is the antithesis of a Puritan. The south- 
ern Englishman is rarely a Puritan. Puritanism 
has, alas, from time to time been forced on him 
by foreigners like the Scotch, and by long-sighted 
persons in control of industry, who have realised 
that the Puritan makes the best and most efficient 
servant and can generally be relied on to give 
27 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

twenty-five shillings' worth of work for twenty 
shillings' worth of wages. 

The love scenes in the Shaw plays are aneemic, 
meaningless, almost ridiculous. Compare them 
with the hectic chapters in the latter part of 
"Anne Veronica"! Like all Puritans, Shaw 
shudders at physical love as something rather im- 
proper and unpleasant. With true English 
sentimentality, Wells insists in "The New Machi- 
avelli" not altogether that the world is well lost 
for love but that, at the call of love, one must throw 
the world overboard whether one will or no. To 
talk to Shaw of the love that never counts the cost 
would be to talk to him of pernicious rubbish. 
But, with a far greater vision, Wells realises that 
this love remains the one overmastering incentive 
of human action. 

Shaw is first and foremost a moralist. He is so 
complete a moralist that he lost all his sense of criti- 
cal value and acclaimed that dull preacher Eugene 
Brieux as a great European dramatist. Wells is a 
humanist as Dickens was a humanist. It is this 
quality of humanism that has enabled him to fit into 
each new era in which he has lived. The new circum- 
stances find the new Wells. As Gilbert Chesterton 
has said, one can almost hear him grow. 
28 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

I have already suggested some of the vital dif- 
ferences between Wells and Arnold Bennett. 
Bennett is an unemotional spectator of the drama 
of life, every detail of which he sees with his calm 
cynical eyes. He stands aloof from the charac- 
ters he creates. He remains absolutely impersonal. 
Wells must cast himself for the chief part in every 
drama that he conceives. He is always his own 
Prince of Denmark and without him his Hamlet 
would be dull, uninteresting, dead. Bennett 
sneers at life. Wells shouts at life. Bennett is 
the more careful and meticulous observer. Like 
Thomas Hardy, he makes his scene almost the 
chief protagonist of his story. The characters in 
"The Old Wives' Tale," in "The Card," in "Clay- 
hanger," in "These Twain" and in "Hilda Less- 
ways" are all the children of the pottery district 
of Midland England, known as the Five Towns. 
Had they been born and had they lived anywhere 
else, they would have been spiritually different. 
Wells sets his stories, for the most part, in Lon- 
don and in Kent. But their scenes have no great 
significance. His characters are affected by social 
circumstances and hardly at all by the peculiar 
life of the localities in which they are placed. 

Arnold Bennett was born in the Five Towns, 
29 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

but he has escaped from them as completely as 
Shaw has escaped from Dublin. He lived for 
some years in France. His art has been largely 
formed on French models. He looks at the life 
about which he writes from the outside. He knows 
it intimately. He sees it completely — but he no 
longer belongs to it. 

Wells still belongs to the rock from which he 
was hewn. He belongs to his class, to his nation, 
to his part of that nation, in all essentials, as com- 
pletely as he did at the beginning of his career, 
and as completely as Dickens did to the end of 
his life. 

There are certain points of resemblance be- 
tween Wells and John Galsworthy. There are, 
indeed, points of resemblance between any two 
men that one cares to select — between, say, Presi- 
dent Harding and Carpentier, between Lloyd 
George and Charlie Chaplin. But between the 
two writers there is a great and obvious gulf fixed. 

Like Wells, John Galsworthy is moved by in- 
equality and injustice and oppressed by the over- 
mastering part played by money in the modern 
world. But Galsworthy is sedate, calm, judicial, 
eminently well bred. He is a typical member of 
the English upper middle class — the class of the 
30 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

lawyers and the doctors and the professors, of the 
successful commercial men and the upper grade 
servants of the State, who have all been educated 
at long-established public schools and either Ox- 
ford or Cambridge, and who, whether they be 
pleased or displeased, approving or indignant, re- 
gard anything like excited enthusiasm as both 
stupid and ill-mannered. 

There is not, I suppose, in the whole of modern 
English literature a more complete demonstra- 
tion of the horror of money grubbing and money 
worship than the series of Galsworthy's novels 
that tell the story of the Forsythe family, begin- 
ning with "The Man of Property" and ending 
with "To Let." The demonstration is tremen- 
dously effective because of its calmness, because 
of its perfect proportion, because of the absence 
of exaggeration and because of the evident en- 
deavour to set down nothing in malice. But 
this Forsythe Saga is a demonstration of the tem- 
peramental difference between Galsworthy and 
Wells. What Galsworthy does with perfect suc- 
cess in three long novels and a short story, Wells 
would do, perhaps quite as effectively, in a few 
furious pages. 

Galsworthy has the qualities of a very fair- 
31 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

minded judge. He always wants to hear what 
can be said on both sides. Wells is always sure 
that there is only one side — his side — and he has 
no time to waste in listening to nonsense. 

Galsworthy is a sympathetic observer of mod- 
ern life. Nine times out of ten in any social or 
political controversy, he and Wells would be on the 
same side. When the fight begins, however, Gals- 
worthy always feels that decency and breeding 
demand that his opponents shall be treated 
gently, as misguided persons with the very best 
of intentions; whereas Wells has no other idea but 
to hit the enemy over the head with a club. The 
club is well aimed. The blow is given without any 
malice. The bashing may be regarded as a nasty 
job. But it is a nasty job that has to be done. 
And it is an essential part of the Wells philosophy 
never to run away from nasty jobs. 

No two men could be more utterly unlike (in 
mind, and body, if not in estate) than Wells and 
George Moore. Someone once said of Moore: 
"He is wonderful but he sets fire to nothing." 
Wells is an incendiary bomb. Moore is quite as 
interested in himself as Shaw and Wells are in- 
terested in themselves, as eager to talk about 
himself, as ready to narrate his own adventures 
32 




ARNOLD BENNETT 
Reproduced by permission of "John O'London's Weekly' 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

— even ready, so it is said, to narrate adventures 
with himself as hero, which have never taken place. 
George Moore's egoism is patronising. Bernard 
Shaw's egoism is critical. Wells's egoism is fra- 
ternal. 

Both Shaw and George Moore (both, remem- 
ber, "denationalised Irishmen") regard them- 
selves as entirely and magnificently different from 
the rest of the world. Wells is interested in him- 
self because he sees in himself the photograph of 
his fellows, a little "touched up," perhaps, as the 
photographers say, because of his genius, but 
nevertheless a photograph. He says in effect: 
"Kipps is Wells but for the grace of God" and 
"Kipps is you because fate has not intervened." 

In "The Confessions of a Young Man" and his 
trilogy "Hail and Farewell," Moore insists that 
Moore is an extraordinary, exceptional being, 
whom not even the High Powers of Heaven could 
make the rest of us resemble. 

George Moore is a very great novelist, a stylist 
with acute observation and a power of construc- 
tion learned from the French. As a literary artist 
the author of "Esther Waters" is the superior of 
the author of "Tono-Bungay." But considering 
the men as servants of their age, there can be no 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

comparison between them. George Moore's per- 
sonality was wittily summarised by Susan Mitchell 
who said that some men kiss and tell, some men 
kiss and don't tell, George Moore doesn't kiss and 
tells. Wells certainly kisses — and he quite con- 
ceivably tells. 

The men of an epoch, the men that influence 
contemporary thought and contemporary life are 
always depicted the men of one particular nation. 
It is true that neither art nor philosophy knows 
anything of national boundaries. The artist and 
the philosopher may carry delight and influence 
living from one end of the earth to the other. But 
they, themselves, must be national. 

Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Shelley, Thack- 
eray, Dickens were first and foremost English. 
No other country but England could possibly 
have produced them. Moliere, Voltaire, Hugo, 
Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert were, in their several 
ways, first and foremost French. No other coun- 
try but France could possibly have produced 
them. Many American writers of distinction have 
produced work that might have been written by 
Englishmen. That was inevitable. But the liter- 
ary art of outstanding importance, produced in the 
short history of the United States, is as vehemently 
34 






AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

American and not English, as the plays of Victor 
Hugo are vehemently French and not English. I 
repeat that one of the causes of Wells's importance 
is that he is English from top to toe. 

There is no connection whatever between em- 
phatic nationalism and crude jingoism. A man 
may belong to his own country and may never 
spiritually travel very far from it, without failing 
to realise the qualities of other peoples and without 
desiring materialistic domination over them. This 
nationalism in his blood gives Wells a far greater 
importance than belongs to Bernard Shaw and 
George Moore. Similarly he has a greater impor- 
tance then Joseph Conrad, supreme writer as he is, 
since Conrad is a portent, a solitary who has left 
his own people while retaining many of their char- 
acteristics, and has adopted a new people and a 
new language, without attaining any of the quali- 
ties that differentiate that people from the rest of 
the world. 

There is splendid aesthetic pleasure to be de- 
rived from the writing of a man who has by some 
miracle become a supreme master of a language 
which was not originally his own. There is an im- 
mense interest in his philosophy and his point of 
view. But the philosophy and the point of view 
35 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

have very little application to the dreams, the dis- 
appointments and the aspirations of other men, 
because Conrad's experience has been unique, and 
life, as he sees it, can only exist for himself. 

Conrad is a lonely man. He has left behind so 
much. He has apparently found so little to take 
its place. His native Poland was left behind years 
ago. His life as a seaman — "the voices of rough 
men now no more, the strong voice of the ever- 
lasting winds, the whisper of a mysterious spell" — 
are now "all shoved behind 'im, long ago, and far 
away!" His own loneliness has impelled him to 
believe that the vital life of every individual man 
is the life which no man can share. The "privacy 
of the soul" is emphasised in almost every one of 
his stories. This is the note of the great Russian 
masters of whom Joseph Conrad is the spiritual 
child. His characters stand apart. They are not 
aware of "the latent feeling of fellowship with all 
creation." They are not really unsocial, because 
their creator has spent years at sea and the sailor 
soon learns that we are all members one of the 
other. But the feeling of fraternity is always 
struggling against the instinct for solitude, the de- 
sire of man to hide himself in himself. 

Solitariness and aloofness have certainly no part 
36 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

in the Wells philosophy. The individual is first 
and always a member of society, his brother's 
keeper born with an insistent and inescapable duty 
to destroy the folly and stupidity that exists around 
him. In "The World Set Free," Wells says: "His 
(man's) chief activity, for a hundred centuries and 
more, was the subjugation of himself and others to 
larger and larger societies. . . . The ape in 
us still resents association." 

An American critic has called Joseph Conrad 
"a historian of hearts." Wells is the historian of 
society, the commentator on social life, the crusader 
against social evils. 

In his "A Personal Record," Joseph Conrad 
says: "I will make bold to say that neither at sea 
nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsi- 
bility." An intense sense of responsibility is a 
brake on rash action. It hampers the adventurer 
since it fills him with a certain doubt concerning 
the effect of his adventure. The sea captain takes 
as few risks as possible. Joseph Conrad, the 
novelist, writes like a sea captain — enormously 
careful to exaggerate nothing, to say nothing that 
he does not know to be absolutely true, and to tell 
his story as perfectly as it is in him to tell it. Such 
a man must always have impulse well in hand. 
37 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Wells is the creature of impulse. Whatever he 
thinks he says. Whenever an idea occurs to him 
he acts on it, promptly and vehemently. 

It is not necessary to say much of the evident 
difference between Wells and Gilbert Chesterton 
and Hilaire Belloc. In "A Modern Utopia" Wells 
says: "There is no abiding thing in what we know. 
We change from weaker to stronger lights." In 
"Heretics" Chesterton says: "It is not true that 
everything changes; the things that change are all 
the manifest and material things." The difference 
is fundamental. 

Hilaire Belloc is a gifted Catholic historian and 
his criticisms of "The Outline of History" will be 
dealt with in the chapter devoted to that book. 
Chesterton and Belloc are Catholics, regarding 
every event and every movement from the point of 
view of men accepting without question the tradi- 
tional faith handed down by the saints. To them, 
the Catholic Church is the one inspired, stable, 
illuminating and explanatory institution on earth, 
the same yesterday, to-day, for ever. 

To Wells this attitude of mind is appalling. To 
Chesterton, Wells's spiritual adventures are amus- 
ing. To Belloc, they are offensive. 

Chesterton and Belloc have a philosophy which 
38 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

may be summed up as: "Let us eat, drink and be 
merry for, whatever may be the ills of life, we are 
the children of God, and therefore we have the 
right to rejoice." The love of beer and wine and 
home is part of their creed. I am convinced that 
they both believe that prohibitionists will be 
eternally damned. 

J. C. Squire has wittily parodied Belloc in his 
"Tricks of the Trade." 

So Sussex men, wherever you be, 

Hey diddle, Ho diddle, Do, 
I pray you sing the song with me, 

Hey diddle, Ho diddle, Do; 
That of all the shires, she is the queen 
And they sell at the "Chequers" at Chanctonbury Green 
The very best beer that ever was seen, 
Hey Dominus, Domine, Dominum, 

Domini, Domine, Domino! 

Wells is no Puritan or spoil-sport. He may not 
find so much cause for rejoicing as Chesterton. He 
may not rejoice so loudly. But the Chesterton- 
Belloc drinking songs might well be sung by Mr. 
Polly in the evening at the Potwell Inn. 

I propose to conclude this series of comparisons 
by putting Wells alongside the two great masters 
of fiction of an older generation, who are living 
when this chapter is written — Anatole France and 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Thomas Hardy. How does the significance of 
Wells appear when he is taken into the veritable 
Land of the Giants? 

Like Wells and Shaw, Anatole France is a 
Socialist. Since the war, indeed, he has "rallied" to 
the Third International and has permitted himself 
to be numbered among the disciples of Lenin. But 
Anatole France is essentially a man without faith. 
He does not believe in anything very much, and I 
am quite certain that he has little hope that the 
Gospel of Moscow will create a new heaven and a 
new earth. 

Joseph Conrad has written of Anatole 
France : 

He is a great analyst of illusions. He 
searches and probes their innermost recesses as 
if they were realities made of an eternal sub- 
stance. And therein consists his humanity ; this 
is the expression of his profound and unalter- 
able compassion. He will flatter no tribe, no 
section, in the forum or in the market place. 
His lucid thought is not beguiled into false pity 
or into the common weakness of affection. He 
feels that men born in ignorance as in the house 
of an enemy, and condemned to struggle with 
error and passions through endless centuries, 
should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope 
40 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

for ever deferred. He knows that our best hopes 
are irrealisable ; that it is the almost incred- 
ible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest 
privilege to aspire towards the impossible; that 
men have never failed to defeat their highest 
aims by the very strength of their humanity, 
which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but 
leaves them disarmed before their irremediable 
littleness. 

This is the philosophy of despair. You may try. 
Indeed, you must try, but you are quite certain to 
fail. No goal can ever be reached. No battle can 
ever be won. Life is utterly meaningless. 

Anatole France is the supreme ironist. He looks 
out on life and he finds a sort of pained amuse- 
ment, for he is essentially humane, in the joys and 
sorrows, in the struggles and disappointments of 
his fellows. I know no more completely ironic, I 
might say cruelly ironic, incident in fiction than the 
account of the funeral of the unfortunate comedian 
in Anatole France's "L'Histoire Comique." It is 
all so horribly — worse still — so amusingly true. 

Wells may have none of Anatole France's dig- 
nity and restraint. It may well be that he may 
never be counted among the princes of literature 
where Anatole France sits secure. But he has 
41 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

certainly none of the great French writer's despair. 
He urges to battle with the promise of victory. The 
Martians may invade the earth, but the earth will 
destroy them. 

The prize may not always be as satisfying as the 
anticipation. When he has thrown his old career 
overboard and has eloped with Isabel, Remington, 
the hero of "The New Machiavelli," may discover 
that he looks back with almost bitter regret and 
there may be tears in Isabel's eyes. But something 
has been gained, something real, when as Reming- 
ton says: "I crossed over to her and crept closely 
to her and drew her wet cheek to mine." 

Wells may not have Browning's robust faith in 
the ultimate victory of good over evil, and of wis- 
dom over folly, but he does believe that something 
worth while can always be gained, and this faith 
has become robuster as the years have gone on. 

Thomas Hardy shares Anatole France's con- 
ception of life as long days of meaningless pain. 
He says of Jude : "He was the sort of man who was 
born to ache a good deal before the fall of the 
curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify 
that all was well with him again." 

It is curious that the two greatest modern mas- 
ters of the novel should share the old Puritan idea 
42 




ANATOLE FRANCE 
From a Caricature by Guitry in " Le Temoin' 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

that life is necessarily painful, though, unlike the 
old Puritans, they promise us no heaven of delight 
as a compensation for the ills endured in the flesh. 
Mr. Harold Child has said of Thomas Hardy: 
"Nature, love, power — he sees the sadness and in- 
sufficiency of them all. . . . Philosophically the 
novels taken as a whole are an expression of the 
belief that the world is governed by a force neither 
good nor evil and indifferent to man's feeling." 

But Hardy is not absolutely without faith. He 
does not possess Anatole France's complete un- 
belief. Some years ago, he said in a letter to me 
that he supposed that his poems contain "more 
vital matter than my other books" and "The 
Dynasts" is certainly the culminating achievement 
of his genius. The characters of "The Dynasts" 
are shown as the sport of circumstances, driven 
hither and thither by fantastic irresponsibility, but 
with it all the poet sounds a definite note of hope. 

"But — a stirring thrills the air 
Like to sounds of joyance there 
That the rages 
Of the ages 
Still be cancelled, and deliverance offered from 

darts that were, 
Consciousness the Will informing, till It 
fashion all things fair !" 

43 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Change the word "Consciousness" into "Com- 
mon Sense" and we have something like a summary 
of the Wells faith. It is man's ineffectual struggle 
against the great forces of life that is the back- 
ground of the tragedy of the Hardy novels. It 
is man's often ineffective struggle against, not 
eternal forces, but futile conventions that generally 
make the drama of life as Wells sees it. It is, per- 
haps, because his enemy is less powerful that Wells 
is the more confident of victory. 



44 



CHAPTER THREE 

In a letter written to me in 1901, Wells said: 

My biggest thing, my most intimate thing, 
my first line of battleships is "Anticipations," 
my best piece of significant story writing "The 
Invisible Man." I think "The Wonderful 
Visit" manages to be pretty and that "Mr. and 
Mrs. Lewisham" is as near beauty as I am ever 
likely to get, and I am fond of "The War of 
the Worlds" because of its spirited destruction 
of property. I don't like "The First Men in 
the Moon" as a whole, but I think it contains 
some of the best descriptive writing I have ever 
done. And I have a great tenderness for "The 
Island of Dr. Moreau" because it is the only 
book of mine that I think has been treated un- 
fairly. But in places I must admit in spite of 
my affection that it is not good. 

That letter was written six years after the publi- 
cation of the first Wells novel. Until then, in all 
the books that he had written, he had made use of 
"the teeming suggestions of modern science." 
45 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Writing of this first period of Wells's literary 
career Gilbert Chesterton says: 

Mr. Wells began his literary work with vio- 
lent vision — visions of the last pangs of this 
planet. . . . He went on to wilder and 
wilder stories about carving beasts into men and 
shooting angels like birds. . . . Since then 
he has done something bolder than either of 
these blasphemies; he has prophesied the politi- 
cal future of all men ; prophesied it with aggres- 
sive authority and a ringing decision of detail. 

This summary was written in 1905, just after 
the publication of "A Modern Utopia," after the 
publication of "Love and Mr. Lewisham" and 
most of the scientific romances, but before the 
writing of "The War in the Air," "The World 
Set Free" and "The War That Will End War." 

Wells was twenty-nine when he first began to 
write novels. He had had a scientific education 
and he probably possessed a wider and better bal- 
anced knowledge of science than a great many men 
with strings of learned degrees. He has explained 
that he took to writing as a profession because it 
was better paid than teaching and that he had "al- 
ways taken the keenest interest in writing English." 

There was another and most important factor 
46 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

that made him a successful fiction writer from the 
beginning. Wells was a scientist with an audacious 
imagination. The average scientist is preoccupied 
with facts. He is interested in things as they are. 
Possibly, because the more a man knows the more 
he is impressed with the number of things that he 
does not know, the average scientist is chary of 
prophecy, and loath to foretell the effect of new 
discoveries and the results of new knowledge. 

But Wells for all his scientific knowledge was 
at heart an artist, a man of dreams and imagination. 
Whenever he heard of some new discovery, he, at 
once, began to think what its consequences might be 
and to prophesy in the guise of romance. It will 
be interesting to note how good a prophet Wells 
has been. But it is first necessary for me to point 
out that the writing of his scientific romances, his 
imaginative application of modern science to the 
individual and collective life of men, led directly 
to his first essay as a sociologist and as a conse- 
quence to his association with the Socialist move- 
ment in England. 

"Anticipations," "my first line of battleship," 

was published in 1901 and reprinted with a new 

introduction in 1914. In this introduction Wells 

says that he was laughed at thirteen years before 

47 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

for prophesying that "long before 2000 and pro- 
bably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have 
soared and come home safe and sound." 

His material prophecy had been entirely justi- 
fied, but he had not quite understood in 1901, the 
soul-killing dangers that an apparently more 
rationally organised society might bring with it. 
He confesses that when he wrote "Anticipations" 
he had not understood "the danger of interference 
and paralysis" arising from the constant "nosey 
Parkerism" (to use a Cockney vulgarism) of 
bureaucrats and small efficient persons. He fin- 
ishes this introduction with a summary of the faith, 
which as I have indicated, runs throughout all his 
work. 

It is not by canvassing and committees, by 
tricks and violence but by the sheer power of 
naked reasonableness, by propaganda and open 
intention, by feats and devotions of the intel- 
ligence, that the great state of the future, the 
world state will come into being. 

I have said that Wells is nationalistic, by which I 

mean that he is absolutely English in his qualities 

and his limitations. No doubt he is also patriotic, 

though this is an entirely different thing, but his 

48 




G. K. CHESTERTON 

Reproduced by permission of "John O'London's Weekly" 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

patriotism in 1901 and his nationalism at the Wash- 
ington Conference has not prevented him from 
realising that civilisation can only continue by- 
means of international co-operation. He says in 
"Anticipations": 

I infer that whether violently as a revolution 
or quietly and slowly this grey confusion that 
is democracy must pass away inevitably by its 
own inherent conditions, as the twilight passes, 
as the embryonic confusion of the cocoon crea- 
ture passes into the higher stage, into the higher 
organism, the world state of the coining years. 

Gilbert Chesterton has ridiculed the whole idea 
of the Wells World State. 

He says in his innocent way that Utopia must 
be a world-state, or else people might make war 
on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for 
a good many of us, if it were a world-state we 
should still make war on it to the end of the 
world. For if we admit that there must be 
varieties in art or opinion, what sense is there 
in thinking there will not be varieties of govern- 
ment? The fact is very simple. Unless you are 
going deliberately to prevent a thing being 
good, you cannot prevent it being worth fight- 
ing for. It is impossible to prevent a possible 

4 49 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

conflict of civilisations, because it is impossible 
to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If 
there were no longer our modern strife between 
nations, there would only be a strife between 
Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend 
to union only; the highest thing tends also to 
differentiation. You can often get men to fight 
for the union ; but you can never prevent them 
from fighting also for the differentiation. This 
variety in the highest thing is the meaning of 
the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of 
the great European civilisation. 

This criticism is not hard to meet. Variety of 
government is already tending to disappear. Al- 
ready all over Europe and America, government 
is in the hands of elected persons. Presently the 
same system will be the rule in Asia and Africa. 
Ideals, too, are becoming common to all peoples 
and national differences ever grow less. Moreover 
— and this is the really important point — unless 
war, with its ever-increasing destructiveness, is not 
abolished, all existing civilisations will assuredly be 
destroyed. 

Wells says: "Let us live by creating a world 
state." Chesterton's answer is: "Let us die." 

To return for a moment to the material prophe- 
cies, the aeroplane prophecy was sound. Another 
50 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

good prophecy in "Anticipations" is that a great 
war would speedily occur and that when it did 
occur "the whole mass of the efficient in the State 
will have to be at work" for the State. Wells 
foretold the coming of the tanks and in "When the 
Sleeper Wakes" the moving side- walks now being 
considered in Paris. But Wells was a bad prophet 
when he wrote: "I must confess that my imagina- 
tion in spite even of spurring refuses to see any 
sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its 
crew and founder at sea." 

He believed that the risk of death under horrible 
circumstances would be so demoralising that it 
would be impossible to provide the submarine with 
an effective crew. Wells was for once unable to 
realise the almost infinite courage of the common 
man and of his ability to fit himself into the most 
novel and the most uncomfortable conditions. 

The last chapter of "Anticipations" is called 
"The Faith of the New Republic" and it is interest- 
ing to notice how far the Wells of 1900 was from 
the Wells of "God the Invisible King." In 1900 
Wells said: 

To men of the kinetic type belief in God so 
manifest as purpose is irresistible, and, to all 
51 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

lucid minds the being of God, save as that gen- 
eral atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended 
purpose in which our individual wills operate is 
incomprehensible. To cling to any belief more 
detailed than this, to define and limit God in 
order to take hold of Him, to detach oneself 
and parts of the universe from God in some 
mysterious way in order to reduce life to a 
dramatic antagonism, is not faith, but infirmity. 

Wells's scientific mind revolts against the dis- 
order of the world, its wastefulness, its futilities. 
But when he came into close personal contact with 
"scientific" Socialists, who wanted to reduce the 
picturesque and sometimes thrilling muddle of life 
into a likeness of a well ordered schoolroom, where 
everyone should sit where he was told, and do as 
he was told, and think as he was told, by trained, 
competent and entirely unimaginative teachers, the 
artist in him revolted. After his experiences with 
these people, he wrote : 

I saw what hitherto I had merely felt that 
there was in the affairs of mankind something 
unorganised which is greater than any organisa- 
tion. This unorganised power is the ultimate 
sovereign in the world. It is a thing of the 
intellectual life and it is also a thing of the will. 
52 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

It is something transcending persons just as 
physical or biological science or mathematics 
transcends persons. It is a racial purpose to 
Which our reason in the measure of its strength 
submits us. It is what was intended when 
people used to talk about the Age of Reason, 
it was vaguely apprehended when the Victorians 
spoke of Public Opinion. Since writing "An- 
ticipations" I have got into the habit of using 
for it the not very elegant phrase the Collective 
Mind. 

He revolts against bureaucracy and super-or- 
ganisation with the assertion that nothing much 
can be done for men unless men collectively will 
it. Collective Mind must fashion the way of sal- 
vation. In the preface from which I have quoted, 
we have the summary of Wells of the first period, 
the Wells of the scientific romances. He has trav- 
elled far in twenty years but the changes have been 
definite and logical progressions. The child Wells 
is the father of the man Wells. 

To him, intelligence is always of paramount im- 
portance. It was the intelligence of the Martians 
in "The War of the Worlds" that nearly made them 
the conquerors of the earth before they were de- 
stroyed by the earthly bacteria to which they were 
unused. 

53 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

It is also a vital part of the Wells gospel that 
intelligence is of little use unless it is backed by 
courage, and that human society suffers almost as 
much from cowardice as from folly. For the man 
who is afraid to be anything but the obedient slave 
of conventions, Wells has nothing but the most com- 
plete scorn. He puts this scorn into the mouth of 
the artilleryman in "The War of the Worlds." 

All these — the sort of people that live in these 
houses and all those damned little clerks that 
used to live down that way — they're no good. 
They haven't any spirit in them — no proud 
dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who 
hasn't one or the other — Lord! what is he but 
funk and precautions? They used to skedaddle 
off to work — I've seen hundreds of 'em, bit of 
breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to 
catch their little season ticket train for fear 
they'd get dismissed if they didn't; working at 
businesses they were afraid to take the trouble 
to understand ; skedaddling back, for fear they 
wouldn't be in time for dinner ; keeping indoors 
after dinner for fear of the back streets; and 
sleeping with the wives they married, not be- 
cause they wanted them, but because they had a 
bit of money that would make for safety in their 
one little miserable skedaddle through the world. 
Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of 
54 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

accidents. And on Sundays — fear of the here- 
after. As if hell was built for rabbits. 

The Wells ambition is to clear the world of its 
rabbits and to populate it with courageous men — 
intelligent, resourceful, fully realising the interde- 
pendence of every member of society. 

In 1908, seven years after the publication of 
"Anticipations," he wrote "The War in the Air." 
This was two years before Bleriot flew across the 
Channel and while the Zeppelin was still in its in- 
fancy. "The War in the Air" is an extraordinary 
anticipation of what happened during the Great 
War. In a new preface written last year, Wells 
says: 

The main idea is not that men will fly or to 
show how they will fly ; the main idea is a thesis 
that the experience of the intervening years 
strengthens rather than supersedes. The thesis 
is this; that with the flying machine war alters 
in its character ; it ceases to be an affair of fronts 
and becomes an affair of areas; neither side, 
victor or loser, remains immune from the gravest 
injuries, and while there is a vast increase in the 
destructiveness of war there is also an increased 
indecisiveness. Consequently, "War in the Air" 
means social destruction instead of victory as 
55 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

the end of war. It not only alters the methods 
of war but the consequences of war. 

The Great War was in many respects a fulfil- 
ment of Mr. Wells's romantic imagining, although 
the aeroplane and the airship did not play the 
supreme part in the struggle that they certainly 
will play in the next war, if human folly allow that 
to occur. In the epilogue of "The War in the Air" 
Wells foretells the inevitable collapse of civilisa- 
tion under the strain of the new warfare and he 
claims that this collapse has already taken place in 
Russia and that it is still a possibility in other 
countries. Fact has justified fiction and it is fair 
to suggest that a man who has proved that he pos- 
sesses such a long range of accurate vision is a man 
to whom the world may well listen with attention, 
whenever he preaches and whatever may be the text 
that he selects. 

"When the Sleeper Wakes" was written "in that 
remote and comparatively happy year 1898." 
Wells was already interested in sociology and in 
possible social development. He conceived a society 
something like Hilaire Belloc's servile state in 
which labour should be completely enslaved and the 
world ruled by a combination of financiers and 
industrial magnates. 

56 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

He has recently confessed that he has come to the 
conclusion that such a world can never exist. "I 
was young in those days, I was thirty-two, I had 
met few big business men and I still thought of 
them as wicked, able men." Now he doubts both 
the ability and the wickedness. The doubts arose 
in his mind years ago, and Ostrog, the ruthless 
superman of "When the Sleeper Wakes" became 
eleven years afterwards unscrupulous, lovable 
Uncle Ponderevo who made a great fortune only 
to lose it in "Tono Bungay." 

After re-reading "When the Sleeper Wakes," 
it seems to me quite conceivable that, within two or 
three generations, international combinations of 
capitalists may be the actual rulers of the world, 
instead of being as they now are one of the great 
powers behind all the thrones. It is true that the 
masters of industry were unable to prevent the 
Great War — unable or unwilling, because neither 
in Germany nor anywhere else did these men antici- 
pate the economic chaos that must follow a war 
fought under modern conditions. They lacked in- 
telligence. They lacked imagination. 

Nevertheless, the war seems to have increased the 
chances of actual capitalistic domination unless the 
whole fabric of the industrial world is to fall to 
57 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

pieces. It is unfortunately impossible to have much 
faith in the reconstructive power of international 
organised labour. Lenin has rendered international 
Socialism impotent for our time at least. In 
France, now the clou of Europe, the Socialist Party 
is grotesquely powerless for good or ill. In Eng- 
land, though the Labour Party may win seats in the 
House of Commons, the power of labour to in- 
fluence world affairs is lamentably weaker than it 
was before the war. 

Political statesmanship throws up its hands in 
horror at the industrial problems with which it is 
faced, and a few weeks before these lines were 
written, a serious suggestion was made for the 
creation of a huge international trust to finance the 
reconstruction of Europe. The suggestion seems 
to me to be eminently practicable and possibly the 
only way by which the industrial machine can be 
re-started and the people can again be adequately 
fed. 

If such a trust comes into being, the prophecy of 
"When the Sleeper Wakes" may be to some extent 
fulfilled. Governments would be necessarily sub- 
servient to the controllers of the trust and, as the 
years went by, the trust would become more and 
more dominant and more and more impatient of 
58 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

interference from politicians. This is exactly 
what happens in "When the Sleeper Wakes." 

The next step would probably be that the poli- 
ticians would be swept on one side and the direction 
of world affairs would pass from parliaments to the 
offices of captains of industry and to bankers' back 
parlours. 

Wells says that "the thesis of a gradual system- 
atic enslavement of organised labour, presupposes 
an intelligence, a power of combination, and a 
wickedness in the class of such financiers and in- 
dustrial organisers, such as this class certainly does 
not possess and probably cannot possess." But 
suppose that it can be proved that without "the en- 
slavement of organised labour" the labourer and his 
wife and children must starve, where would be the 
wickedness of a new organisation which would pro- 
vide food as the price of slavery. Suppose — and no 
one acquainted with the economic conditions exist- 
ing in this year 1922 throughout the Western world 
will dare suggest that it is any wild supposition — 
suppose that society has to choose between starva- 
tion or slavery, what then? 

Wells says that "much evil may be in store for 
mankind but to this immense grim organisation of 
servitude our race will never come." I hope not. 
59 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

But I am not sure. It is possible that Wells has 
prophesied better (or worse) than he knew. 

"When the Sleeper Wakes" is the first of the 
series of books which Wells calls "fantasias of pos- 
sibility." The last of the series is "The World Set 
Free," published in 1914 and written after his most 
fertile years — 1908 to 1912 — in which he wrote 
"Tono-Bungay," "Anne Veronica," "The History 
of Mr. Polly," "The New Machiavelli" and 
"Marriage." 

To me, "The World Set Free" is rather a dull 
book, a book definitely difficult to re-read. It has 
however already proved itself tragically accurate 
prophecy. 

Few of us before the war dreamt of the pos- 
sibility of bombs being dropped on enemy cities far 
behind the fighting line. But Wells did not re- 
quire the war to tell him that this was a certainty 
of the future. His "war that ends all wars" takes 
place in 1959 and this is what happened before it 
has been waged very long: 

From nearly two hundred centres, and every 
week added to their number, roared the un- 
quenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic 
bombs, the flimsy fabric of the world's credit 
had vanished, industry was completely disor- 
60 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ganised and every city, every thickly populated 
area was starving or trembled on the verge of 
starvation. Most of the capital cities were burn- 
ing; millions of people had already perished and 
over great areas government was at an end. 

Wells supposes that from the discovery of 
radium activity, scientists had gone on to the atomic 
disintegration of other elements and then to the 
practical employment of this release of energy. 
Atomic energy became the great source of power 
replacing steam, electricity and petrol. Then it was 
used for war. The bombs dropped from aero- 
planes "were lumps of pure carolinum, painted on 
the outside with unoxydised cydonator inducive en- 
closed hermetically in a case of membranium." The 
admission of air "set up radio activity in the outer 
layer of the carolinum sphere," and almost im- 
mediately "the whole bomb was a blazing continual 
explosion." 

Hitherto, bombs and shells have exploded and 
have been done with but the Wells Carolinum 
bombs go on exploding for at least seventeen days 
and perhaps for ever! Faced with these horrors 
the inevitable international conference was held to 
bring war to an end once and for all. Wells once 
again insists that the only possible way to ensure 
61 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

perpetual international peace is to create a world 
state. In the novel, this world state comes into 
being not so much through the action of rulers and 
statesmen as by the subtle influence of the collective 
mind which is to Mr. Wells what Charles the First's 
head was to Mr. Dick. Here is a conversation 
which took place at the international conference 
between the King of England and the President of 
the United States. 

"Science," the King cried presently, "is the 
new king of the world." 

"Our view," said the President, "is that 
sovereignty resides with the people." 

"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a be- 
ing more subtle than that. And less arithmeti- 
cal. Neither my family nor your emancipated 
people. It is something that floats about us, 
and above us, and through us. It is that com- 
mon impersonal will and sense of necessity of 
which science is the best understood and most 
typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It 
is that which has brought us here, which has 
bowed us to all its demands." 

It seems unfortunate that the mind of the race 
cannot get to its work of salvation until the race has 
been half destroyed by stupidity, but it is interest- 
62 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ing to note this insistence on mind as saviour, the 
keynote of Wells's philosophy. 

Incidentally there is a repetition of many of the 
details of the Wells philosophy in "The World Set 
Free." "She lived in great fear of the Public 
Health and Morality Inspectors because she was 
too poor to pay the customary tip to them," is a 
gibe at bureaucratic tyranny. The thesis of the 
book is summarised on one of the later pages. 

People are cruel and stupid in a stupid age 
who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious 
age. The world also has its moods. . . . 
Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, be- 
lieved that the division of the world under a 
multitude of government was inevitable and 
that it was going on for thousands of years 
more. It was inevitable until it was impossible. 

Wells echoes Bible doctrine. It is only through 
great tribulation that society, like the individual, 
can inherit the kingdom. 

It is the custom of some critics to dismiss the 
Wells scientific romances, "the fantasias of pos- 
sibility," as mere clever imitations of Jules Verne, 
the characters being, as one writer has said, 
"merely puppets, marionettes, introduced for the 
purpose of setting off his stories about flying 
63 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

machines, escalators, and a peculiar form of food." 
This is absurdly superficial. Wells began by using 
his scientific knowledge as the background for a 
story. Some of his stories, "The Invisible Man," 
for example, are just yarns. But as he proceeded to 
make imaginative use of his scientific knowledge, he 
was first led to the writing of a series of highly in- 
teresting prophecies, many of which have already 
been justified, and then to the consideration of the 
effect of increased knowledge on the lives of men 
and on the development of society. 

In these early books, some of which I have exam- 
ined in this chapter, there is the germ of the 
philosophy which was afterwards to be developed in 
the brilliant 1908-1912 series of novels, was to be 
reconsidered in the darkness of the Great War, was 
to have its hesitating doubts expressed in "Mr. 
Britling Sees It Through," and was to have its 
(for the moment) final expression in "The Outline 
of History," "The Salvaging of Civilization" and 
"Washington and the Hope of Peace." 



64 



CHAPTER FOUR 

Wells's reputation as a novelist depends mainly 
on seven books — "Love and Mr. Lewisham," writ- 
ten in 1901, in his first period; "Kipps," published 
in 1905, "Tono-Bungay," "Anne Veronica," "The 
History of Mr. Polly," "The New Machiavelli" and 
"Marriage," published between 1908 and 1912. His 
two other pre-war romances "The Passionate 
Friends" and "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman," 
are of less artistic value and significance. To me, 
"The History of Mr. Polly" is Wells's supreme 
masterpiece and I propose to devote a separate 
chapter to its consideration. In many respects it 
is a thing by itself — a thing of magnificent 
individuality. 

The other novels are all related to each other — 
chapters of Wells's criticism of modern life. The 
criticism is amazingly comprehensive. Great evils 
are denounced but little evils are not forgotten. 
"Anne Veronica" is largely a denunciation of fam- 
ily tyranny, — a big thing enough — and in the last 
65 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

chapter of "Kipps" there is a stern gibe at the 
discomfort of the modern English house — want of 
cupboards may be a small but it is a real evil. The 
novels are autobiographical in so far as Wells has, 
for the details of his plots, drawn from his own 
experiences as a young science student, as a shop 
assistant, and, in the later stories, as a politician. 
When "The New Machiavelli" was first published 
it was a favourite parlour game to guess the real 
names of its characters. But it is altogether an 
error actually to identify Wells with any of his 
creations, except Britling. They may have the 
experience that he has had — but they are not Wells. 

Mr. Lewisham is an ill-paid schoolmaster. Wells 
was, for a little while, an ill-paid schoolmaster. 
Kipps is a draper's apprentice. Wells for a while 
was a draper's apprentice. In describing the tra- 
vail of Mr. Lewisham and of Kipps, however, the 
novelist is not actually describing the things that 
happened to him but describing what might have 
happened to him had he not possessed the qualities 
that made escape possible from the worlds of 
Lewisham and Kipps. 

At no time in his life could Wells really have been 
like Lewisham. At no time in his life could he 
possibly have resembled Kipps. But having been 
66 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

in their worlds, he realises their aspirations, their 
troubles and their dreams. The man, however, who 
possesses the power to escape can never feel the 
tyranny of circumstance in the same way as the 
man who is compelled to remain. Wells really re- 
lates the spiritual adventures that he would have 
experienced had he remained Mr. Lewisham or 
had he ever been Kipps. He is not capable of the 
entire detachment of Arnold Bennett from his char- 
acters. If the reader sometimes feels that no half 
educated weak schoolmaster would feel as Mr. 
Lewisham feels, this in itself is a proof that the 
novel is in its essence the revelation of the author. 
Wells is telling you about Wells when he thinks he 
is telling you about Lewisham. 

At the beginning of "Love and Mr. Lewisham," 
its hero was a boy of eighteen — an underpaid assist- 
ant master in a provincial private school, scorning 
delights and living laborious days. Mr. Lewisham's 
week was carefully mapped out. Every hour had 
its task. The boy was as fiercely determined to 
educate himself as Wells must have been, when he 
first discovered that higher education offered a com- 
petence and began the struggle for "various grants 
and scholarships." Then Ethel arrived in Mr. 
Lewisham's life and brought love with her, and 
67 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Ethel and love at once caused Mr. Lewisham's 
dismissal from the private school. 

Two and a half years pass and we meet a maturer 
Mr. Lewisham with "an inagressive but indisput- 
able moustache," a student at the Kensington Col- 
lege of Science, living on a maintenance grant of 
a pound a week, earnest, of course, and shabby with 
(a touch of Wells's experienced realism) an india 
rubber washable collar, "curiously shiny, a surface 
like wet gum." Mr. Lewisham was a Socialist and 
the colour of his tie was red. 

Mr. Lewisham was doing well at Kensington 
(incidentally a girl fellow student with brains was 
taking an interest in him) when Ethel and love once 
more appeared on the scene, and, having a hundred 
pounds in the bank, which he inherited from his 
mother, and absolutely no prospects, he persuaded 
the girl to marry him and "for three indelible 
days Lewisham's existence was a fabric of fine emo- 
tions." Life was too wonderful and beautiful for 
any doubts or forethought. 

Then came the tragedy of earning a living in an 
underpaid profession, the fading of the glamour, 
quarrels, disappointments, more or less harmless 
flirtations with the girl student aforesaid, the birth 
of a child — and the final abandonment by Mr. 
68 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Lewisham of all hope of the career of which he had 
dreamed. 

It is almost as if Life had played me a trick — 
promised so much — given so little! . . . 

No! One must not look at it in that way! 
That will not do ! That will not do. 

Career. In itself it is a career — the most 
important career in the world. Father! Why 
should I want more? 

And. . . . Ethel! No wonder she seems 
shallow. . . . She has been shallow. No 
wonder she was restless. Unfulfilled. . . . 
What had she to do? She was drudge, she was 
toy. . . . 

Yes. This is life. This alone is life. For 
this we were made and born. All these other 
things — all other things — they are only a sort 
of play. 

Fatherhood and motherhood are the end and not 
the beginning of all things, because, such are the 
inane circumstances of modern life, that for Mr. 
Lewisham and his like, fatherhood means years of 
drudgery, daily life with a woman to whom the 
drudgery must bring prematurely faded looks and 
jagged temper, insistent anxiety concerning the 
feeding, the clothing and the education of the child, 
or children. Overboard with all your dreams, Mr. 
69 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Lewisham! Overboard with all your hopes of 
adventure, of making a name for yourself, of serv- 
ing your generation! You are a father and that's 
the end of you ! 

The man has capacity — but not enough capacity 
and not enough hardness to escape. The man has 
character — but only enough character to suffer. In 
a rational society there would be a chance of hap- 
piness and service for Mr. Lewisham. Modern 
society has nothing for him but anxiety and worry. 
"Waste" might be the second title of the novel. 
Futile, idiotic, damnable waste ! 

Artie Kipps might have gone to the school where 
Mr. Lewisham was a master, one of those hope- 
lessly incompetent private schools, to which the 
lower English middle class used to send their 
children a generation ago, where pretentiousness 
attempted to hide incompetence, and where the 
boys learned nothing except that which is better 
unlearned. Happily these wretched English imi- 
tation schools have now largely disappeared. 

Kipps left school unable to speak English (he 
called himself "a Norfan"), undeveloped mentally, 
fit for nothing except to be the draper's drudge that 
he was destined to be. Yet with all his limitations, 
Kipps was an intensely human little man, as human 
70 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

as Mr. Kenwigs in Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby" 
— and almost equally limited. 

Kipps was apprenticed by his uncle to a Folke- 
stone draper who "set himself assiduously to get as 
much out of Kipps and to put as little into him as 
he could in the seven years of their intercourse." 
He spent his day answering the ever recurring 
command "Kipps forward" and, having aspirations, 
he spent some of his evenings at a wood carving 
class where he met a real lady, Miss Walsingham. 

Then Kipps inherited a fortune of "twelve hun- 
dred pounds a year" and set up to be a gentleman, 
incidentally becoming engaged to the lady of the 
wood carving class. But Kipps had courage. He 
hated being a gentleman and he escaped from 
gentility and his lady fiancee to marry a pretty 
young servant girl whom he had first known when 
he was a small boy. 

Wells draws the girl, Anne, with splendid skill 
and sympathy — Anne with the self-control and the 
queer detachment from emotionalism that charac- 
terise her class. The marriage is a success though 
Anne fights harder against being a lady than Kipps 
had fought against being a gentleman. She will 
have nothing to do with the lady and gentleman 
creed expressed by Kipps's uncle who told them 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"It isn't what you're used to, it's what you ought 
to have now." 

Kipps lost most of his money, started a little 
book shop, got his money back again as though by 
a miracle, and is left happy with Anne and the 
baby on the last page. 

"I was thinking," he said to his wife, "jest what 
a rum go everything is." To which she replies 
affectionately: "Queer old Artie." And there they 
are. "Kipps" is a less significant story than "Love 
and Mr. Lewisham" and the novels that follow 
three years afterwards. Wells uses it to demon- 
strate the colossal futility of what a large part of 
the English nation regarded as education twenty 
years ago, the harsh soul-destroying tyranny of 
life in a retail shop, and the inanity of provincial 
gentility. But the story is dated. In every Eng- 
lish town, nowadays, there is a decently efficient 
middle class school. Acts of Parliament have vastly 
improved the conditions and the morale of shop 
assistants. The England of 1922 is not the Eng- 
land of "Kipps." But Artie remains a thing of 
joy, as real as Sam Weller. 

The "twelve 'undred a year," too is an utter im- 
probability in the life of an ordinary little shop 
assistant and this improbability although it has 
72 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

helped Wells to tell an excellently good story de- 
taches the novel from reality. 

Writing to Wells after the publication of 
"Kipps," Henry James said: 

You have written the first closely and inti- 
mately, the first intelligently and consistently 
ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there 
has always been the sentimental and conven- 
tional interference, the interference of which 
Thackeray is full. 

You have for the very first time treated the 
English lower middle class etc. without the 
picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and 
romantic interference of which Dickens e.g. is 
so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is 
so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vul- 
garity in so scientific and historic a spirit, and 
seen the whole thing all in its own strong light. 

This is the true view of "Kipps." Kipps him- 
self, his troubles and his love affairs, are a delight- 
ful excuse for a fine satiric revelation of the 
littleness, the soul blasting conditions, of a side of 
English life of which Wells had personal experi- 
ence, and every detail of which he knew. The 
facts are set out with humour, with artistic selection 
and with scientific accuracy. 
73 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

The book suggests, as Henry James says, 
an interesting comparison between Wells and 
Dickens. Dickens fastened on some one particular 
and ephemeral aspect of contemporary life at which 
to aim his shafts of cleansing laughter. Wells 
goes deeper and is more comprehensive. 

Kipps is happy because of his fortune. Kipps 
indeed might have been happy under any circum- 
stances with his common-sense Anne. But life for 
the young man, educated in the Kipps school and 
compelled by fate to earn his living in the Kipps 
shop, must be stunted and must be burdensome and 
unsatisfactory, unless the man has learned to ask 
nothing of life and can be content with less than 
nothing. 

"Tono-Bungay" is a development, with greater 
craftsmanship, maturer vision and infinitely more 
humour, of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." Some 
years ago, Wells said that this really great novel 
was written "to give a view of the whole strange 
advertising, commercialised civilisation of which 
London is the centre." I find in it a more in- 
triguing and a more comprehensive purpose. 

The story opens with George Ponderevo, its 
hero, living with his mother, the housekeeper at 
Bladesover House, in Kent. Wells's own mother 
74 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

occupied a similar position. He knows the point 
of view of the upper servant class, their keen in- 
terest in things that do not matter in the least. 
"No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before 
peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a 
peer of the United Kingdom." 

George is banished from Bladesover because he 
fought and beat a "young gentleman," fighting, 
be it said, with complete disregard of the Queens- 
berry rules. Wells insists that Bladesover, the 
typical English country house, is "the clew to 
almost all that is distinctively British." 

That is no longer true. England in 1905 was 
still governed by the class that possessed these 
"places." A good deal has happened since 1905, 
and, if political power is still enshrined in 
"Granges" and "Manors," it is only when they 
have passed from the old families with the long 
lineage to new profiteers with a long purse. 
Aristocratic rule in England is dead, killed, the 
future historian will record, not by the power of 
organised labour, as many people believe, but by 
the aggressive and democratic personality of Mr. 
Lloyd George, exercised in the electrified atmos- 
phere of the war and the years that have followed 
the war. It is possible, perhaps probable, that we 
75 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

are at the beginning of an era of capitalistic rule, 
but so far as England is concerned, the age of 
aristocratic rule has passed. 

George was apprenticed to an uncle who was a 
chemist. Like Mr. Lewisham he worked hard to 
educate himself in (like Wells) scientific subjects 
and finally, again like Mr. Lewisham, arrived in 
London. 

In one of the early chapters of "Tono-Bungay" 
Wells describes, with almost brutal detail, the hor- 
rible life of an evangelical struggling baker in 
Chatham, floundering in small debts, vulgar, un- 
imaginative, almost inconceivably narrow. In this 
chapter he again challenges comparison with 
Dickens. Dickens would have seen some humour in 
Nicodemus Frapp as he found some humour in Mr. 
Chadband. Wells finds nothing but horror. He 
says "I think my invincible persuasion that I 
understand Russia was engendered by the circle of 
uncle Frapp." Certainly there is nothing even 
in Maxim Gorki more repellent than uncle Frapp 's 
household. 

A great adventure awaited George Ponderevo 

when he arrived in London. The chemist uncle 

had preceded him and had started in the patent 

medicine business. The whole thing was humbug 

76 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

but it was advertised with extraordinary skill and 
humour, and it resulted in a great fortune which 
grew greater and greater — until the smash came. 
Uncle Ponderevo, humbug though he be, is, by the 
way, the most lovable character that Wells ever 
created. 

George had the mind of a scientist. He wanted 
to do things that mattered. But (once more like 
Mr. Lewisham) circumstances compelled him to 
waste his talent — always with shame at the bottom 
of his heart — with money-making humbug. He 
was another victim of folly, another example of 
waste. George Ponderevo married, married as 
foolishly as Mr. Lewisham, a shallow, brainless, 
pretty girl, who took his life from him and could 
give nothing in exchange. After their marriage, he 
was maddened by her "absolute disregard of her 
own beauty," by her habit of wearing curl papers 
in his presence, by her appalling taste in furniture. 
"She had no faculty of growth or change," no 
humour, nothing. 

The Tono-Bungay business burst. George's 
marriage went on the rocks, and the woman who 
had qualities which might have made her his mate — 
a woman of the wealthy, leisured world — turned 
away from him after one short hectic episode. 
77 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"I couldn't be any sort of help to you, any 
sort of wife, any sort of mother. I am spoilt. 
I am spoilt by this rich idle way of living, until 
every habit is wrong, every taste wrong. The 
world is wrong. People can be ruined by 
wealth just as much as by poverty." 

Waste, once again! In the end, George Pon- 
derevo saved his soul by rinding work to do, a man's 
work anyhow. He had dreamed of building aero- 
planes, he finished by building swift destroyers. 
But except his work life had left him nothing. In 
his revolt against the pettiness of his wife he 
wrote : 

"I am a spiritual gutter snipe in love with 
unimaginable goddesses. I have never seen 
goddesses nor ever shall — but it takes all the 
fun out of the mud — and at times I fear it takes 
all the kindliness too." 

The society that allows great fortunes to be made 
by the selling of bogus medicines, if they are suf- 
ficiently puffed, is obviously an intensely foolish 
society. So completely commercialised a civilisa- 
tion is a false civilisation. But it is not only in 
material affairs that the world has gone all wrong. 
"Love, like everything else in this immense process 
78 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

of social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing 
adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its 
connexions." 

Years before he wrote "Tono-Bungay," Wells 
protested that there was something in life greater 
than organisation. He has continually gibed at the 
niggling interference of cocksure bureaucrats, but 
when, in this elaborate novel, he set himself to 
summarise the life of his day, he found something 
worse than over organisation — the complete ab- 
sence of any organisation at all. It is the want of 
direction, the absence of plan, the failure to apply 
common-sense to the collective life that is re- 
sponsible for all the trouble, for Nicodemus 
Frapp 's squalor in Chatham, for Uncle Ponder- 
evo's brief glory in London, even for the failure of 
love. 

Something is fundamentally wrong with the 
arrangements of life. But these arrangements are 
ephemeral and the possibility remains that life may 
be great and wonderful. "We are all things that 
make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission, 
out to the open sea." 

"Anne Veronica" was published in the same year 
as "Tono-Bungay." It is a narrower book, the 
story of the revolting daughter. Feminism was in 
79 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

the air, when the novel was written. The suf- 
fragette was being imprisoned for breaking 
windows and assaulting large and amiable police- 
men. Young women were rebelling against 
parental authority. There was nothing particu- 
larly novel about this rebellion. A dozen years 
before, under the influence of Ibsen, boys and girls 
in their teens were loudly announcing their 
determination to lead their own lives. 

Fathers and husbands, however, quite naturally 
disapproved of the eccentricities of the feminine 
agitation (eccentricities which, by the way, unques- 
tionably won the vote for English women) and the 
attempt to exercise control made the discussion 
of family authority topical. In 1909, "Anne 
Veronica" was certainly a topical novel. 

Family life in England and America frequently, 
probably nearly always, still implies short-sighted 
tyranny, intolerable impertinence and inevitable if 
generally secret revolt. Shaw has insisted on this 
over and over again in his plays and Wells echoes 
him in "Anne Veronica." The man who has made 
an utter failure of his own life and the woman of 
comprehensive ignorance never hesitate to tell their 
children that they know what is best for them and 
rarely hesitate to warp lives and cripple indi- 
80 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

viduality by the exercise of authority which would 
not be recognised, but for the fact that the children 
of the middle class are economically dependent on 
their fathers. There can be such a thing as close 
and intimate friendship between parents and 
children, but no man will dare to assert that he 
has known many instances of such friendship. It 
can only exist when the parents are sympathetic 
realists. To quote Capes in "Anne Veronica": 

"Some day, perhaps — who knows? the old 
won't coddle and hamper the young, and the 
young won't need to fly in the faces of the old. 
They'll face fact as fact and understand. Oh, 
to face facts! Gods! What a world it might 
be if people faced facts! Understanding! 
Understanding! There is no other salvation. 
Some day older people, perhaps, will trouble to 
understand younger people, and there won't be 
these fierce disruptions ; there won't be barriers 
one must defy or perish." 

"Anne Veronica" is a love story. When Anne 
rebels against her father and leaves home, she, of 
course, becomes a science student — Wells always 
finds it hard to keep South Kensington out of his 
romances — and suddenly she falls in love with one 
of her teachers and throws herself at his head. 
6 81 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Shaw always makes his heroines chase his heroes 
and in "Anne Veronica" Wells seems to accej)t the 
Shavian doctrine that woman is the pursuer, man 
the pursued. 

She sat down awkwardly and helplessly on 
one of the little stools by her table and covered 
her face with her hands. 

"Can't you see how things are?" she asked. 

Capes did his best to escape. He protested that 
he was married. 

"That," said Anne Veronica "can't prevent our 
loving." So off they went to Switzerland and were 
extraordinarily happy. The love story is told with 
fine knowledge and one is glad at the end that 
circumstances allow Anne and her lover to marry 
and to be as happy married as they were when 
defying the conventions. It is the concessions, the 
compromises, the secrets, the fear that generally 
make marriage banal, irritating, grotesque. There 
is a passage in "Anne Veronica" which summarises 
the only conditions in which a man and a woman 
can live together with any chance of happiness. 

"There is not a compromise nor a sham nor a 
concession between us. We aren't afraid; we 

82 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

don't bother. We don't consider each other; 
we needn't. That wrappered life, as you call 
it — we burnt the confounded rags! Danced 
out of it! We are stark." 

I do not propose to discuss here the political 
criticisms and theories that are contained in "The 
New Machiavelli" and "The Passionate Friends." 
It will be obviously necessary to return to these 
novels in the chapter in which I shall attempt to 
summarise the Wells pre-war political philosophy. 
The personal drama of "The New Machiavelli" 
and of "The Passionate Friends" is on a different 
plane to the drama of "Love and Mr. Lewisham," 
"Kipps" and "Tono-Bungay." 

In each of these five novels the protagonists are 
a man and two women. Mr. Lewisham and George 
Ponderevo, impelled by crude physical passion and 
unprotected by what Wells would regard as sane 
and social arrangements and conventions, marry 
the wrong woman and lose the right woman to 
their own undoing. Kipps escapes from the wrong 
woman to marry his mate and save his own little 
soul. 

The problem raised in "The New Machiavelli" 
and "The Passionate Friends" has nothing to do 
with ephemeral circumstances or social conditions. 
83 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

It is a problem that must remain as long as men 
and women exist, and which tends to become more 
general and more insistent, as knowledge increases 
and men and women become more conscious of 
themselves. In both novels the two women are 
fine, each in her own way. In both novels the man 
wants them both. One calls to him in one mood. 
The other calls to him in another. It is this com- 
mon if not universal tendency to polygamy in men, 
in the man of imagination just as much as in the 
man of mere physical desire, that has been and 
probably always will be a fertile source of human 
tragedy. 

In "The New Machiavelli" Remington, the 
young politician evidently with a brilliant career in 
front of him, sacrifices his career and sacrifices his 
wife Margaret for a woman who, with all her quali- 
ties, is his wife's inferior. Wells stresses this infe- 
riority, realising that the tragedy of sex is that the 
mind and judgment have next to nothing to do with 
a man's choice. They evidently have nothing to do 
with a boy's choice, and they have hardly any 
greater part to play when a man of mature years 
and wide experience has to choose between two 
women. 

The wind bloweth where it listeth but man must 
84 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

go in whatsoever direction the wind of passion wills 
to drive him. 

Remington's friend, Britten, taunts him with the 
meanness of his choice. "You're leaving a big 
work, you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go 
and live with your jolly mistress." Remington 
protests that the gibe is unfair. 

"I'm not going out of this — for delight. . . . 
I'm going for love, Britten, — if I sinned for 
passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I 
saw her the other day, she hurt me. She hurt 
me damnably, Britten. . . . She's ill. Don't 
you understand? She's a sick thing — a weak 
thing. She's no more a goddess than I am a 
god. ... I'm not in love with her now; I'm 
raw with love for her. I feel like a man that's 
been flayed. I have been flayed. . . . You 
don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solici- 
tude. . . . She's not going to do the thing 
easily ; she's ill. Her courage fails. . . . It's 
hard to put things when one isn't rhetorical, 
but it's this, Britten — there are distresses that 
matter more than all the delights or achieve- 
ment in the world. ... I made her what 
she is — as I never made Margaret. I've made 
her — I've broken her. . . . I'm going with 
my own woman. The rest of my life, and Eng- 
land and so forth must square itself to that." 
85 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

The trouble is that the rest of a man's life "and 
England and so forth" will never square itself for 
the man who leaves the best for the second best, 
however inevitable such a choice may be. It is not 
a question of public opinion. It is not a question of 
social convention. It is the fact that only for the 
mean-souled can personal happiness be built on 
the unhappiness of another. And this becomes the 
more impossible when the other is somebody emi- 
nently worth while, somebody who matters, some- 
body who commands admiration. 

Remington felt all this when he got into the train 
with Isabel. I have said that though he had lost a 
great deal he had gained something. But Wells 
leaves one with a very definite impression that as 
the years go on the "something" gained will de- 
crease in value and the memory of the loss will ever 
grow more bitter. 

"The New Machiavelli" is a brilliant study of 
English politics in the first decade of this century, 
but it is something of far greater value than that. 
It is a study of sexual love of tremendous courage 
and honesty and it brings Wells to the Anatole 
France conclusion that, given certain circumstances 
and a certain type of man, whatever he chooses he 
will choose wrong, whichever way he turns his 
86 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

turning must bring dull years of pain to another 
and bewildered disappointment to himself. 

The intrigue of "The Passionate Friends," pub- 
lished two years after, is the intrigue of "The New 
Machiavelli" only, this time, the man chooses his 
wife rather than his mistress — and the woman pays. 
In every respect the novel is inferior to its pre- 
decessor. The action is slow and halting. Indeed 
"The Passionate Friends" is a political pamphlet, 
interspersed with a love story. As I re-read it, I 
felt convinced that Wells was anxious to enunciate 
his theories of social salvation and that he doubted 
whether he would find many listeners unless he 
pretended that he was writing a novel. The story 
is what is known in criminal circles as the "bonnet." 
The reader is lured into expecting a play only to 
find that he is listening to a sermon. 

The sermon is interesting and suggestive but it is 
natural, under the circumstances, that the play 
should be something of a failure. The wife is a 
mere sketch. The mistress is something of a 
poseuse. The man is a self-conscious bore. The 
point of interest in the story is that Wells suggests 
(characteristically telling the truth, however un- 
palatable the truth may be) that a man may love 
his wife, deeply and honestly, and yet be unable to 
87 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

resist the call of another woman, particularly of a 
woman whom he loved before his wife. 

The drama of "The Passionate Friends" has 
comparatively little grip because Lady Mary, un- 
like Isabel in "The New Machiavelli," is really not 
worth bothering about, and when she kills herself, 
Wells is not able to persuade us that anyone on 
earth is really a penny the worse. There is no 
tragedy in the passing of people who do not matter. 
It is not true that it is always the woman who pays. 
Sometimes it is the man. Very often it is both the 
man and the woman. But when the woman is so 
inconsiderable as Lady Mary, it is right and proper 
that it should be she who should pay. 

Perhaps it was Mr. Polly's Uncle Penstemon 
who induced Mr. Wells to write "Marriage" which 
was published in 1912, a year before the publication 
of "The Passionate Friends." Marjorie Pope 
married Richard Trafford, another of Mr. Wells's 
brilliant young scientists, and all went well with 
them, until the day arrived (the day that Wells 
says, arrives in every marriage) when "the lovers 
must face each other, disillusioned, stripped of the 
last shred of excitement — undisguisedly them- 
selves." Then things began to go wrong. 

Marjorie's extravagance became unbearable to 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

an overworked, underpaid scientist. Domestic cares 
interfered with his work and the birth of a second 
child compelled him to give up the research, for 
which he had lived, and to use his scientific attain- 
ments in commerce. The man was successful but 
discontented and the more successful he became the 
more discontented he grew and the wider was the 
gulf between himself and his wife. 

If Trafford was a faithful husband, he 
ceased to be a happy and confident one. There 
grew up in him a vast hinterland of thoughts 
and feelings, an accumulation of unspoken and 
largely unformulated things in which his wife 
had no share and it was in that hinterland that 
his essential self had its hiding place. 

In "Marriage" Wells is once more interested in 
problems from which humanity can never escape 
rather than with the problems created by passing 
conditions. Men of Trafford's type do habitually 
marry women of Marjorie's type. They do 
habitually sacrifice the best of themselves on the 
altar of domesticity. They always or nearly always 
regret the sacrifice and in the course of years they 
create hiding places for themselves where they 
spend their real lives — solitary, secure, unhappy! 
89 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

In the last part of "Marriage," Trafford and his 
wife go to Labrador and contrive to reconstruct 
things for themselves in a series of primitive ad- 
ventures. I do not find this conclusion particularly 
satisfactory or convincing. Wells was apparently 
determined to find Trafford a way out and to dis- 
cover some solution for the problem of the story. 
I do not believe there is any solution to this prob- 
lem. The sooner we learn that there are many 
problems which can never be solved and the sooner 
we are willing to admit that complete happiness 
exists for most people for only a very little while 
and for some people never at all, the less we shall 
kick against the pricks and the less inclined shall 
we be to add disappointment to our other burdens. 

"The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman" is the last of 
the pre-war novels. Its theme is the theme of 
Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and the story is told 
with many references to the suffragette agitation 
which was actual enough in 1914 but is ancient his- 
tory now. The novel adds little or nothing to one's 
knowledge of Wells and of his attitude to the great 
problems of life. 



90 



CHAPTER FIVE 

"The History of Mr. Polly" is Wells's master- 
piece — in acuteness of observation, in appreciation 
of human motives, in sympathy, in humour, the best 
thing that he has done. The story, slight as it is, 
suggests a whole series of interesting and import- 
ant criticisms of life. But the suggestions are only 
suggestions. In "The History of Mr. Polly," 
Wells is for once just an artist. He never preaches. 
He does not even announce his text. He lets his 
characters speak for themselves. 

The plot of the story can be very briefly sum- 
marised. Like Kipps, Mr. Polly was educated at a 
thoroughly incompetent, lower middle class, private 
school. At fourteen he was apprenticed to the 
"hosiery and gentlemen's outfitting." For a few 
years Mr. Polly was a not too successful "as- 
sistant." Then his father died and he inherited 
three hundred and fifty-five pounds. With this 
capital in his possession, he proceeded to marry 
Miriam Larkin for whom, on his wedding day, he 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

felt "alarm, desire, affection, respect — and a queer 
element of reluctant dislike," and to set up in a 
small shop of his own at Fishbourne. 

For fifteen years, Mr. Polly was a struggling 
shopkeeper, striving with ever increasing difficulty 
to make both ends meet. He hated his shop. He 
hated his neighbours. As time went on he began to 
hate his wife. Miriam was stupid, incapable, ut- 
terly irritating, perpetually ready to grumble and 
scold and become limply unhelpful. 

When Wells begins his history, Mr. Polly is 
thirty-seven — a miserable, hopeless man — suffering 
from a severe attack of indigestion. It is charac- 
teristic of Wells, the scientist, that he should recog- 
nise how great a part indigestion often plays in the 
human drama and how fundamental may be the 
spiritual consequences of cold pork with "some nice 
cold potatoes and Rashdall's Mixed Pickles." It 
is this knowledge of the details of life, the needs 
and the troubles of the poor, that gives Wells's 
books one of their distinctive notes. One remembers 
that it was "cubbuds" that Mrs. Kipps particularly 
wanted when she was taking a house. Mrs. Kipps's 
"cubbuds" and Mr. Polly's indigestion are the evi- 
dence of Wells's knowledge of the life that he 
describes. 

92 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Mr. Polly endured for fifteen years — and then 
he revolted. He intended to commit suicide and to 
burn his house down, thus providing his wife with 
a double insurance. The suicide did not come off 
but the fire was a great success, spreading from Mr. 
Polly's own shop to half a dozen other establish- 
ments. Excited by his own handiwork he gallantly 
rescued an old woman and became the town's 
hero. 

Then quietly and unostentatiously he sneaked 
away. His wife had her insurance money. Mr. 
Polly meant to have life. And life was ready for 
him at the Potwell Inn — fierce, Homeric encounters 
with the landlady's murderous nephew, and, finally 
when the nephew was vanquished, happy, easy-go- 
ing content as the landlady's assistant. 

Mr. Polly was a born romantic, a poet, a dreamer. 
When a poet is forced by circumstances to spend 
his days in a ridiculous little shop, fighting bank- 
ruptcy, without the faintest chance of avoiding 
ultimate defeat, you have all the elements of human 
tragedy. 

There are more poets in the world than we sur- 
mise. Thousands of beautiful poems exist in the 
dreams and imagination of ordinary looking men 
and women with no power and no desire to put their 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

imaginings and their dreams onto paper. But 
these mute poets generally have a bad time. 

From his boyhood Mr. Polly had loved books 
and dreamt of adventure. He had always believed 
that "somewhere — magically inaccessible perhaps, 
but still somewhere — were pure easy and joyous 
states of body and mind." Mr. Polly preferred 
books of travel and adventure. He loved Joseph 
Conrad and Charles Lever and all Dumas, though 
for some reason or the other he cared very little for 
Dickens or for Scott. He read Boccaccio and 
Rabelais and Shakespeare and he loved FalstafF 
and Hudibras and coarse laughter and the old 
England of Washington Irving and the memory of 
Charles the Second's courtly days. 

People who have none of Wells's knowledge of 
the English lower middle class have suggested that 
this shabby little hosier, with his hunger for books 
and his zest for life, is an impossible creation of a 
romancer's imagination. But the real value of Mr. 
Polly is that he is true. I myself know a railway 
worker whose reading is much on Mr. Polly's lines. 
I know a working jeweller in Birmingham with a 
library that would have moved Mr. Polly to the 
deepest envy. I have talked to miners in South 
Wales with Mr. Polly's love for colour and adven- 
94 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ture and joy. Mr. Polly is real. Sinclair Lewis has 
told me that since he came to Europe he has found 
that there are Main Streets in England and France 
and Italy as well as in the United States. Similarly, 
there are Mr. Pollys everywhere — men with a great 
hunger for life, a hunger which their poverty and 
the restriction of the circumstances among which 
they pass their lives forbid them to satisfy. 

The distinction of Wells's particular Mr. Polly 
is that he rebelled against circumstance and became 
the master of his own fate. 

In a sense (a very real sense) every rebellion is a 
success. No one rebels against tyranny without 
gaining something. Mr. Polly's rebellion was par- 
ticularly well thought out, and particularly whole- 
hearted. He meant to gain his freedom at any 
price. He was unaffected by the fact that arson is 
commonly regarded as a crime leading to unpleas- 
ant consequences if it be detected. I am not sug- 
gesting that a general habit of setting one's house 
alight is the best method for attaining spiritual 
freedom, but, at the same time, it cannot be denied 
that wholesale arson and the consequent rebuilding 
would be an excellent thing for most modern towns 
and cities. Every man must work out his own plan 
of salvation. 

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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

When he was quite a boy, Mr. Polly had had a 
real romantic love affair with a beautiful young 
lady, who was on one side of a high wall while he 
was on the other. Every day, for ten whole days, 
they talked together and Mr. Polly believed that 
he was a knight and that the young lady was the 
beautiful damsel for whom he was to fight. He 
never forgot the young lady. He never forgot his 
boyish dream. The dream made his life with 
Miriam the more intolerable. The dream compelled 
him at last to leave the stuffy atmosphere of his 
silly little shop for the clean air of the countryside. 
We are told that it is the young men who see visions 
and the old men who dream dreams. But no old 
man ever dreams unless he has seen visions in his 
youth, and unless these visions have compelled him, 
in the years between youth and old age, to indi- 
vidual achievement, to revolt, to something more 
than shadowhood. 

All right minded people will certainly condemn 
Mr. Polly's desertion of his wife, his deceit in allow- 
ing her to think that he was drowned, and the whole 
of his proceedings at the Potwell Inn, to say noth- 
ing of the preliminary arson. But the right and 
wrong of any action can only be judged by its 
results. 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Mr. Polly's vehement self-assertion made a dis- 
contented dyspeptic into a thoroughly contented 
healthy man. That was one good thing. His ar- 
rival at the Pot well Inn finally relieved the amiable 
landlady from the constant bullying of her most 
unpleasant nephew. That was the second happy 
result. 

But what of Miriam? What of the wife whom 
he abandoned? She was discontented, unhappy, if 
you will, and definitely poor while he stopped with 
her. When he bolted, she was able to set up a little 
teashop (with his insurance money) and earn some 
sort of a living. When, after some years, Mr. Polly 
called on her, her only feeling was that it would be 
difficult to pay back the insurance money. The 
world is full of Miriams and there is no good both- 
ering about them. Many men and still more 
women will always be discontented and will always 
succeed in persuading everyone with whom they 
may come in contact that death is preferable to 
life. Self-sacrifice for such people is sheer idiocy. 
If Mr. Pollly had stopped with Miriam, where 
there had been one corpse there would have been 
two. 

He tried to make her happy but he could not do 
it. No person can make another person happy by 
7 97 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

trying. You either make another happy by being 
or you do not make them happy at all. As Mr. 
Polly says: "It isn't what we try to get that we 
get, it isn't the good we think we do that is good. 
What makes us happy isn't our trying, what makes 
others happy isn't our trying. There's a sort of 
character people like and stand up for and a sort 
they won't. You got to work it out and take the 
consequences." 

When Kipps threw over his well-bred fiancee and 
married the housemaid it was a common man's 
proper horror of gentility that was his principal ac- 
tion motive. Passion compelled Remington to leave 
his wife and bolt with Isabel. Affection, a sense 
of duty, and a regard for his position as a father and 
a citizen induced Stratton in "The Passionate 
Friends" to prefer his wife to his mistress. 

Kipps's choice did no one any harm though the 
young lady was temporarily humiliated. Stratton 
and Remington's choice brought with them misery 
to another. Mr. Polly's revolt — perhaps because 
it was entirely personal, the outcome of an over- 
mastering desire to be himself — brought nothing 
but good in its train. If he had bolted from his 
wife with another woman, he would have exchanged 
one servitude for another, but he went out on to the 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

dusty high road, alone with his dreams, an entirely 
free man. And Mr. Polly trudging along whistling 
and shabby is a far more heroic and splendid figure 
than Remington drying Isabel's tears in the first- 
class carriage. 

It requires unusual character and strength of 
purpose to march along the road, to the Land of 
Heart's Desire, without hint, suggestion or tempta- 
tion from another. Mr. Polly is a great romantic 
figure. Wells has followed Dickens in discovering 
that great romantic figures sometimes wear shabby 
clothes and speak English with a Cockney accent. 
The real seer knows that drama and romance, 
tragedy and comedy are all to be found on every- 
one's doorstep if only one has eyes to see and the 
heart to understand. The hack writer travels into 
worlds of which he knows nothing for the characters 
and the incidents of his stories, protesting, in his 
ignorance, that there is no colour in the common- 
place, no movement in the mean streets. Dickens, 
Hardy, Wells, Bennett find colour and movement 
in the life of which they have an intimate 
knowledge. 

There can indeed be no life without drama. 
Tragedy and comedy jostle each other wherever 
two or three men are gathered together. 
99 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

It is worth noting that, in this book which I re- 
gard as Wells's greatest achievement, there is a 
sustained humour to be found in none of his other 
novels. The only characters in the Dickens novels 
that are really human are the comic characters. 
Squeers and Mrs. Gamp are human beings. Ralph 
Nickleby and Jonas Chuzzlewit are melodramatic 
unrealities. The Marchioness is a lovable young 
woman of flesh and blood, Agnes is a lay figure 
stuffed with sawdust. 

Practically all the characters in "The History of 
Mr. Polly" are comic and they are real, — Mr. Polly 
himself, the comic dreamer, with his eager hunger 
for books and his curious habit of manufacturing 
high f alutin' language as a means of expressing his 
revolt against the commonplace — "sesquippledam 
verboojuice," "eloquent rapsodoce," "urgent loo- 
goobuosity," "stertoraneous shover," and so and 
so on; all Mr. Polly's relations, comic characters 
every one of them — particularly his Uncle Pen- 
stemon who attended his father's funeral and 
Polly's own wedding. Uncle Pensternon was "a 
fragment from the ruder agricultural past of our 
race." 

"You've got to get married," said Uncle 
Pensternon resuming his discourse. "That's the 
100 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

way of it. Some has. Some hain't. I done it 
long before I was your age. It hain't for me 
to blame you. You can't 'elp being the marry- 
ing sort any more than me. It's nat'ral — like 
poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. 
You can't 'elp it and there you are. As for the 
good of it, there ain't no particular good in it 
as I can see. It's a toss up. The hotter come 
the sooner cold; but they all gets tired of it 
sooner or later." 



Tony Weller's philosophy brought up to date ! 

Mr. Polly's neighbours in Fishbourne are comic, 
— Hinks, the sporting saddler and Chuffles, the 
grocer, "a small hairy silently intent polygamist"; 
Tonks, the second grocer, "submerged by piety"; 
Rusper, the ironmonger, "a tall, lean, nervous, con- 
vulsive man" — and the rest. Even Mrs. Polly is 
really a comic character, in her capacity to combine 
"great earnestness of spirit with great practical 
incapacity." 

The clash between the artist husband and the 
futile dreamless wife is always told in the spirit of 
pure comedy. Mr. Polly finds a place in the house 
where they might have some flowers in pots. "Not 
me," said Miriam, "I've had trouble enough with 
Minnie and her musk." There is the woman in a 
101 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 



nutshell — as truly comic as Mrs. Wilfer in "Our 
Mutual Friend," and as hard to endure. 

Mr. Polly's escape is comic. His rights at the 
inn are splendid comic fights and the conclusion of 
his journey with the lovably fat landlady is sane 
and most entrancing comedy. 

Mr. Polly concludes that he and all his fellow 
creatures are helpless in the hands of destiny, but he 
has little personal quarrel with destiny though he 
remains a little bewildered. 

"One seems to start in life," he said, "expect- 
ing something and it doesn't happen. And it 
doesn't matter. One starts with ideas that 
things are good and things are bad — and it 
hasn't much relation to what is good and what 
is bad. I've always been the skeptaceous sort 
and it always seemed rot to me to pretend men 
know good from evil. It's just what I've never 
done." 

The end is inconclusive. But so far as our 
knowledge goes, the end is always inconclusive. We 
most of us spend our time "expecting something!" 
And for most of us as for Mr. Polly "it doesn't 
happen." 



102 



ur 



CHAPTER SIX 

In the months immediately preceding the begin- 
ning of the war, Wells set out to summarise his 
social and political philosophy. He published the 
volume of essays called "An Englishman Looks at 
the World" and he wrote new prefaces to "Antici- 
pations" and "Mankind in the Making." The pub- 
lication of "Anticipations" in 1901 brought him 
into touch with the Fabian Society which, under the 
leadership of Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Bea- 
trice Webb, has been for thirty years the brains of 
the English Socialist movement. 

Fabian Socialism has always implied government 
by enlightened bureaucrats and, at first, Wells ac- 
cepted such a bureaucracy as a necessity in the new 
society for which he yearned. It was under Fabian 
influence that Wells wrote "A Modern Utopia" 
with its dream of a class of Samurai — enlightened, 
unselfish, intellectual aristocrats — which should 
govern not for the satisfaction of place and power 
but for the sake of the governed. 
103 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

His connection with the Fabian Society did not 
last very long. It was, he said, a "never entirely 
harmonious marriage of mind" and his knowledge 
of the Webbs left him with serious doubt concern- 
ing bureaucratic government, however enlightened 
it might be, and distinctly sceptical concerning the 
Samurai whom he had himself conceived. 

Nevertheless, in 1914, Wells was still a Socialist. 
Mr. H. L. Mencken sneers at his "flabby Social- 
ism." Another American critic speaks of his "modi- 
fied Socialism — the general diffusion of equality 
and well-being." 

Wells has said, himself, that his knowledge of 
concrete things was quite extensively developed be- 
fore he began to consider philosophy and sociology. 
He approached the new problems from the point 
of view of a man skilled in laboratory research. The 
chaos of competitive, capitalistic society irritated 
him because of his conviction that "things are in 
their nature orderly." He discovered that the pri- 
vate ownership of things that should properly be 
regarded as the inheritance of the whole race led to 
"much obstruction and waste of human energy and 
a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the mass 
of mankind." He accepted the Socialist faith that 
land, raw materials and the instruments of the pro- 
104 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

duction of wealth should be owned by the State and 
that private property should be restricted and 
terminable. 

His detailed profession of Socialism was pub- 
lished in 1908 in "New Worlds for Old," a book 
which, with some inevitable individual details, meets 
with the approval of the orthodox Socialist. Six 
years later, experience had caused him to modify 
his faith. He revolted against the idea that "every- 
one will be necessarily a public servant or a public 
pupil because the State will be the only employer 
and the only educator" and declared that the new 
society for which he himself was working must be 
"a form of liberty and not a form of enslavement." 
He said: 

I would like to underline in the most em- 
phatic way that it is possible to have this Great 
State, essentially Socialistic, owning and run- 
ning the land and all the great public services, 
sustaining everybody in absolute freedom at a 
certain minimum of comfort and well-being and 
still leaving most of the interests, amusements, 
and adornment of the individual life, and all 
sorts of collective concerns, social and political 
discussion, religious worship, philosophy and the 
like to the free personal initiatives of entirely 
unofficial people. 

105 



. 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Wells would have every citizen regarded as a 
shareholder in the State. As a shareholder he would 
be sure of a certain minimum income which he would 
apparently receive whether he worked or not. If 
he chose to work, he would have additional wages. 
If he did not choose to work, he would be kept by 
the work of his fellows just as the Socialist contends 
the share owning class is kept now. 

The idea seems to me entirely fantastic, and the 
Fabian conception of a State, in which every man 
would be compelled by authority to do the work 
for which the bureaucracy considered him most 
fitted, and in which laziness would be promptly 
punished, is much more in accord with common 
sense and therefore much more likely to be created 
than the Wells State in which there would be a 
comfortable dole even for the laziest. 

Wells is as insistent as Chesterton and Belloc that 
the instinct of man demands that he shall possess 
property of a real and personal sort, even though he 
may not be able to own land or shares in railways 
and factories. His modified Socialism is the an- 
tithesis of Communism. 

But though it is good for a man to have his own 
wine cellar and his own garden patch, Wells realises 
that the "small holding," according to Belloc and 
106 




HILAIRE BELLOC 
Reproduced by permission of "John O'London's Weekly' 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Chesterton, necessary for salvation, may be actively 
demoralising. In "The New Machiavelli," he makes 
Remington's father say: 

"Property's the curse of life. Property! 
Ugh ! Look at this country all cut up into silly 
little parallelograms, look at all those villas we 
passed just now and those potato patches and 
that tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's 
minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's 
tail. Patching and bothering about it. Bother- 
ing! Yapping at every passer by. Look at 
that notice board! One rotten worried little 
beast wants to keep us other rotten little beasts 
off his patch, — God knows why! Look at the 
weeds in it, look at the mended fence . . . 
There's no property worth having, Dick, but 
money. That's only good to spend. All these 
things. Human souls buried under a cartload 
of blithering rubbish." 

There is no sort of intellectual sympathy between 
Wells and Lenin but even in 1914 Wells had some- 
thing of Lenin's contempt for modern democratic 
government. He talks of "this grey confusion that 
is Democracy" and prophesies that it must pass 
away, killed by its own inherent qualities. In 
another place he insists that, owing to the unscien- 
tific method of voting, French deputies, American 
107 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Congressmen and English Members of Parliament 
are equally unrepresentative, nothing but "the il- 
legitimate children of the Party System and the 
ballot box." Democratic countries are all governed 
by professional politicians and the system, in es- 
sence, is as complete a tyranny as government by 
Czars. It will continue so long as the method of 
election remains as it is to-day, and until it is sup- 
planted by something like proportional representa- 
tion which would give constituencies the chance of 
expressing their real mind and of sending genuine 
representatives to Parliament and to Congress. 

There is one part of the Socialist programme 
about which Wells is particularly emphatic and that 
is the Endowment of Motherhood. He wrote in 
1901: "Parentage rightly undertaken is a service 
as well as a duty to the world, carrying with it not 
only obligations but a claim, the strongest of claims, 
upon the whole community. It must be provided 
for like any other public service in any completely 
civilised State, it must be sustained, rewarded and 
controlled." 

Four years afterwards in "A Modern Utopia" 

he declared that in his ideal society motherhood 

would be "the normal and remunerative calling for 

a woman, and a capable woman who has borne, 

108 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

bred and begun the education of eight or nine well 
built, intelligent and successful sons and daughters 
would be an extremely prosperous woman, quite 
irrespective of the economic fortunes of the man 
she has married." 

In 1914, he was of the same mind. "The modern 
State," he wrote, "has got to pay for its children if 
it really wants them . . . That is the essential idea 
conveyed by this phrase the Endowment of Mother- 
hood." 

It seems a little doubtful whether any State will 
ever be rich enough to pay what the modern edu- 
cated woman would consider a fair return for bear- 
ing, breeding and educating eight or nine children 
— a task which would leave her little if any time for 
any other occupation and precious little oppor- 
tunity for anything but the mildest amusement, for 
the space of nearly twenty years. 

It is difficult to find an answer to the case for the 
Endowment of Motherhood if it be admitted that 
the world of to-day has some responsibility for the 
world of to-morrow. But it is still more difficult to 
understand how motherhood can be made, at once, 
the most remunerative and the most interesting of 
professions, and to believe now that women have 
practically the same opportunities for development, 
109 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

for interesting work, and for individual success as 
men, that any large proportion of capable women 
will agree to bear more than one or at the very 
outside two children. 

The only woman who will be attracted by the 
Motherhood endowment will necessarily be the 
comparatively incapable and unenterprising, and 
the consequence will be that with endowment the 
same conditions will continue as exist without en- 
dowment. The least capable will have the more 
children and the more capable the fewer. It is 
certainly not clear that the Endowment of Mother- 
hood must essentially provide the world with a 
more efficient race and must necessarily help 
towards the elimination of the comparatively unfit. 

Moreover, if the State is to accept responsibility 
for the maintenance of children it must necessarily, 
sooner or later, supervise the creation of children. 
Wells realised this when he wrote "A Modern 
Utopia." He says that from the point of view of 
the State, marriage is only important in so far as it 
involves the probability of offspring and therefore 
the State is justified in seeing that marriage only 
takes place under certain conditions. 

The contracting parties must be in health and 
condition, free from specific transmissible taints, 



110 






AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

above a certain minimum age and sufficiently in- 
telligent and energetic to have acquired a mini- 
mum education. The man at least must be in 
receipt of a net income above the minimum 
wage, after any outstanding charges against 
him have been paid. 

In any society where this were the rule, the bride 
and bridegroom would have to pass an educational 
test and be examined by a doctor before they were 
granted a marriage licence. Wells suggests that the 
man should be at least twenty-six and the woman at 
least twenty-one. All this involves novel interfer- 
ence with personal liberty which would certainly be 
very bitterly resented. It also involves the creation 
of new crimes, — unauthorised unions, the bearing 
of illegitimate children. 

If society is to be scientifically organised such 
tyranny would be inevitable. It is accepted, as a 
matter of course, by the Fabian propagandists. But 
Wells, after the writing of "A Modern Utopia," 
began to rebel against super-organisation. He be- 
gan to doubt whether nature was quite as orderly 
as he had supposed. He still clung to the Endow- 
ment of Motherhood without, so far as one can 
gather from "An Englishman Looks at the World," 
admitting the possible consequences, unless society 
111 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

is to become humane enough to pay for the bad 
children as well as for the good, and unless the whole 
doctrine of eugenics, about which Wells has his 
doubts, is abandoned as a delusion and a snare. 

Just as Wells is critical of democracy, so is he 
antagonistic to the social and political theorist with 
cut and dried plans for the creation of the new 
world, in which everyone shall be ready and willing 
to do exactly what he is told by some highly com- 
petent and extremely virtuous bureaucrat. The 
theorist knows nothing about the realities of life, 
and ignores its passions, its crudities, the red cor- 
puscles in its blood. Wells has often been more 
interested in passing social conditions than in vital 
human problems, but long before 1914 (notably in 
"The New Machiavelli") he was forced by his ob- 
servation and his love for truth to dig below the 
surface and his digging proved to him the utter 
futility of schemes for social re-organisation which 
ignores the fierce, vehement humanity of the com- 
mon natural man. Britten in "The New Machia- 
velli" says: 

"It has the same relation to progress — the 

reality of progress — that the things they paint 

on door panels in the suburbs have to art and 

beauty. . . . Your Altiora's just the politi- 

112 






AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

cal equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth 
for embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social 
Reform for the Parlour. . . . It's foolery. 
It's prigs at play. It's make believe, make 
believe! Your people there haven't got hold 
of things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, 
don't know anything of life at all, shirk life, 
avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and 
talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while 
the Night goes by outside — untouched." 

So long as reformers and philanthropists regard 
their fellow men as creatures to be saved from their 
own folly, to be directed, to be persuaded into petty 
orderliness, to be compelled to throw off the quali- 
ties and the habits that make their individual lives, so 
long will all schemes of social reform be a tremen- 
dous failure. Before any plan for permanently 
making the world happier and cleaner can be de- 
vised, there must be a recognition of the fact that 
man is a creature of impulse and passion, often 
rejoicing hugely in his sins and hugging his failings 
to his breast. 

Wells knows this. The artist in him realises this 

first truth and it is the artist in Wells that has 

forced him to disbelieve in scientific reform. His 

friend, Mr. Meek, the bath chair man, is poor and 

& 113 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

diseased and often miserable but Wells emphati- 
cally believes that Mr. Meek is happier in our "still 
largely unre formed universe" than he would be in 
a soulless, perfectly organised community. "The 
innate forces, the innate selective forces" possessed 
by the human mind will always be strong enough to 
prevent the scientific dragooning of human society. 

Wells's scientific soul revolts against the Chester- 
ton-Belloc conception of an ideal society made up 
of "vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom 
ruled, wholesome, and insanitary men." He dreams 
of a world in which there is "an almost universal 
freedom, health, happiness and well-being." He 
has no ready made plan for bringing such a world 
into existence. The one obvious method is to at- 
tack, constantly and fiercely, all abuses, all the 
cruelties and all the stupidities that exist in our 
present society, while rejecting every suggestion 
for change that ignores fundamental human neces- 
sities. He has faith in the certainty of progress 
and in the capacity of men and women to retain 
their humanity under whatever new conditions the 
future may be preparing for them. 

Vehemently as Wells rebels against the fussy 
tyrannical interferences of bureaucrats and busy- 
bodies, he cannot altogether throw overboard the 
114 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

belief that the direction of public affairs must pass 
into the hands of an ascetic aristocracy, separated 
from the rest of society by a devotion to duty, by 
a life of self-sacrifice and by an exalted code of 
morals. 

It is interesting to note that England was for 
generations governed by an aristocracy of birth 
that to some extent resembles the Wells aristocracy 
of mind. The English aristocrat, who filled prac- 
tically every Government position of importance 
until the beginning of this century, was generally 
a man of ample means, entirely indifferent to the 
salary he received, often serving his country at 
great personal inconvenience, very often hopelessly 
bored by the details of official life, but recognising 
that inherited privileges brought with them in- 
herited responsibilities. These English aristocrats, 
whether they called themselves Whigs or Tories, 
were naturally not sympathetic to political theorists 
who threatened the destruction of their order, but 
they ruled patriotically and with a large measure of 
common-sense, and, when once great social evils 
were brought to their notice (as they were not very 
intelligent, this generally took a long time), they 
were ready enough to agree to remedies even when 
those remedies meant loss to themselves 
115 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

The development of Democracy, that has given 
political power not to the mass of the people but to 
men who belong by birth to the mass of the people, 
men uninfluenced by family tradition, has certainly 
not improved the quality of the governing class, 
has certainly not brought with it any more enlight- 
ened national or international policy, and could not 
prevent a horrible war the consequences of which 
will for generations threaten the general standard 
of comfort. 

On the face of it, therefore, there is a tremendous 
case for government by an aristocracy, but it is 
clear to me that this aristocracy must either be 
hereditary and therefore narrow visioned and gen- 
erally selfish, or it must be recruited from the push- 
ing, the super-intelligent and the people with a 
mania for interference with their fellows, and this 
means that in practice the Wells aristocracy would 
be nothing more than the bureaucracy which he 
loathes. 

In 1914, Wells was already dreaming of a World 
State and foretelling the passing of existing politi- 
cal entities unless they could find for themselves 
some new significance and some new mission. The 
British Empire, the creation of chance, with its 
component nations bound together by nothing but 
116 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

sentimental ties, must become "the medium of 
knowledge and thought to every intelligent person 
in it or it is bound to go to pieces." 

The Empire, mediately or immediately, must 
become the universal educator, news agent, book 
distributor, civiliser-general and vehicle of 
imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else 
it must submit to the gravitation of its various 
parts to new and more invigorating associations. 
No Empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted 
anything of this sort, but no Empire like the 
British has ever yet existed. Its conditions and 
needs are unprecedented. Its consolidation is 
a new problem, to be solved, if it is solved at 
all, by untried means. 

The Empire, Wells says, was made by "excep- 
tional and outcast men." Before the war he feared 
that it might be lost by commonplace and dull- 
minded leaders. In these comments on the British 
Empire there is the suggestion of the World State 
which should be instinct with intelligence, created 
not to attain material advantage but to serve to 
fill the spiritual needs of the people. As early as 
1913 in "The Passionate Friends" there is a descrip- 
tion of this World State, the creation of science, art, 
philosophy and literature, the four great posses- 
117 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

sions of humanity which "broaden sympathy and 
banish prejudice." 

Such a creative conception of a human com- 
monweal can be fostered in exactly the same 
way that the idea of German unity was fostered 
behind the Dukedoms, the free cities and King- 
doms of Germany, the conception so created 
that it can dissolve traditional hatreds, incor- 
porate narrower loyalties and replace a thou- 
sand suspicions and hostilities by a common pas- 
sion for collective achievement, so created that 
at last the national boundaries of to-day may 
become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying 
good will of men as the imaginary line that 
severs Normandy from Britanny or Berwick 
from Northumberland. 

This is also the text of the post-war "Outline of 
History." This is the text of the letters from 
Washington. The war, as I shall show, had a tre- 
mendous effect on Wells's outlook on life but what 
is for him the only way of salvation for a world, 
bruised and ruined by the greatest war in history, 
was in his mind before the war began. The new 
Bible of humanity, which Wells has recently de- 
vised, with its selection of the finest from every 
literature in the world, was in embryo at least part 
118 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

of the scheme of redemption set out in "The Pas- 
sionate Friends." 

This then was the Wells of 1914 — a Socialist so 
long as the individual was left with those personal 
possessions necessary for his happiness and self- 
respect ; a believer in government by the intelligent 
and efficient so long as the evils of bureaucratic 
busybodyism were avoided; a convinced believer 
that the nations must combine together in some sort 
of international World State if harsh inequality is 
to be destroyed and the maximum of happiness 
obtained; a man in revolt against disorder but a 
little fearful that scientific order may bring with it 
soul-destroying, inhuman, over-organisation. 



119 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

I said in the first chapter of this book that the war 
had a fundamental effect on the Wells philosophy. 
In the summer of '17 he professed that he had "gone 
on very considerably." It was impossible for a 
man so sensitive to the life around him not to have 
been profoundly affected when leisurely, prosper- 
ous pre-war England became a land of dramatic 
surprise, tragic happenings, and most reasonable 
perturbation. Wells published three novels in 1915, 
"Boon," "Bealby" and "The Research Magnifi- 
cent." They are really the work of the pre-war 
Wells and none of them has much importance in 
considering the individuality of their author. 

"Boon" was first published under a pseudonym 
although its real author was never more than a 
secret de Polichinelle. It is a sort of parody of 
Henry James, a parody which the Anglo-American 
bitterly resented. Writing to Henry James in the 
summer of '15, Wells said: 
120 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"Boon" is just a waste-paper basket. Some 
of it was written before I left my home at Sand- 
gate (1911), and it was while I was turning 
over some old papers that I came upon it, found 
it expressive, and went on with it last December. 
I would rather be called a journalist than an 
artist, that is the essence of it, and there was 
no other antagonist possible than yourself. But 
since it was printed, I have regretted a hundred 
times that I did not express our profound and 
incurable difference and contrast with a better 
grace. 

The most significant thing in this letter is the 
remarkable admission: "I would rather be called a 
journalist than an artist." It is one of those tre- 
mendously courageous self -revelations that makes 
Wells such an interesting human being. 

In 1916, Wells published "Mr. Britling Sees It 
Through," in 1917, "The Soul of a Bishop," and 
in 1918, "Joan and Peter." It is from these three 
novels, and particularly from "Mr. Britling" that 
we can discover the effect of the war on the soul and 
the mind of the novelist. 

"Mr. Britling Sees It Through," is one of the 

invaluable documents of the Great War. It is a 

careful and extraordinarily accurate record of the 

feelings of the English people of the liberal-minded 

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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

middle class during the most menacing years in 
the whole history of their country. If posterity 
wants to know what England felt during the first 
two years of the Great War — and it is probable 
that posterity may have a considerable curiosity in 
this respect — there is no contemporary record, that 
I know, that will tell it so much. 

In 1916, the American people were still specta- 
tors of the struggle — for the most part sympathetic 
spectators — eager to know more of what was hap- 
pening in England than they could learn from the 
newspapers, and this eager interest gave "Mr. Brit- 
ling Sees It Through" a far greater success in 
America than any of the Wells novels that preceded 
it. Wells shows in this book a complete understand- 
ing of the American point of view. In this he is 
once more typical, for the great majority of 
Englishmen thoroughly understood and appre- 
ciated the reasons that induced America to hesitate 
long before joining in the European welter. 

Mr. Britling is Wells himself. Mr. Britling's 
spiritual and mental bewilderment and adventures 
were Wells's own, though, happily, the novelist did 
not have the tragic experience that fell to the central 
figure of his book. Mr. Britling's Essex home is 
Wells's home and all the characters are portraits of 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

his neighbours. Colonel Rendezvous is the highly 
competent soldier who for some time commanded 
the Canadian army in France and is now known as 
Lord Byng. The journalist is Ralph Blumenfeld, 
the American born editor of the "Daily Express," 
Lawrence Carmine is Cranmer Byng, the oriental 
scholar and poet. Wells deliberately sat down to 
describe, in the form of a novel, the reaction of the 
war on himself and on the people whom he knew 
most intimately and understood most thoroughly. 

The early chapters give an accurate picture of 
those long ago days before the war, when England 
was unenterprising and sluggish because she was 
prosperous and comfortable. The nation was at 
the end of "a series of secure generations" in which 
there had been no vital material changes. It was 
because of the conviction that there could be no 
danger of a general breakdown that men and women 
allowed themselves to be recklessly violent in par- 
ticular cases — violent in the methods of the feminist 
demand for votes, violent in the Carsonite opposi- 
tion to Irish Home Rule. England was a pleasant 
disorderly go-as-you-please country. The position 
is summarised in a conversation between the Brit- 
ling's German tutor and an American visitor at 
their house. 

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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"In Germany everything is definite. Every 
man knows his place, has his papers, is in- 
structed what to do. . . ." 

"Yet," said Mr. Direck, with his eyes on the 
glowing roses, the neat arbour, the long red wall 
of the vegetable garden and a distant gleam of 
cornfield, "it all looks orderly enough." 

"It is as if it had been put in order ages ago," 
said Herr Heinrich. 

"And was just going on by habit," said Mr. 
Direck taking up the idea. 

Like most Englishmen, Mr. Britling rather 
gloried in the disorganisation, but, unlike most 
Englishmen, he realised the danger of disorganisa- 
tion. 

July, 1914, came with the assassination of the Aus- 
trian Archduke and the possibility of war, but even 
then the only individual in the Britling circle who 
really believed that war would occur was the Ger- 
man tutor. Certainly, if Russia and Austria began 
to fight, Germany and France would be involved. 
Certainly if France were threatened, England 
would be forced to come in. But the whole idea 
was preposterous, unthinkable. "The sound com- 
mon-sense of the mass of the German people" 
would hold off Armageddon. Essex was sceptical. 

Events hurried on to their tragic conclusion. 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Herr Heinrich was called home to be a soldier, 
paying a sentimental farewell to his English 
friends. A few days afterwards all western Europe 
was at war. Mr. Britling records the state of the 
English mind during these fateful August days. 
Germany must be beaten. It was impossible for 
her to defeat the three greatest peoples in the world. 
However perfectly her armies might be equipped, 
whatever new war machines she might have pre- 
pared, whatever victories she might win at the be- 
ginning, in the end she must be defeated and in the 
end the German Empire, only a little more than 
fifty years old, would fall to pieces. That was what 
England felt in 1914. It was a faith that was ulti- 
mately justified but it was a faith that was far less 
robust in '16, in '17 and in the spring of '18. 

Wells also records the remarkable fact that, at 
the beginning, England was disposed to regard the 
war as a monstrous joke. I am not sure that this 
attitude of mind was common to the whole of Eng- 
land but it certainly existed in London and in that 
part of England that shares the Cockney mind with 
London. It is characteristic of the Londoner to re- 
gard almost all human happenings as rather funny. 
He has no genius for indignation and, to him, as 
Wells says, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince 
125 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

seemed monstrously silly pantomime figures, start- 
ing a silly war which must inevitably bring about 
their own undoing. 

As one reads Mr. Britling, the beginning of the 
war and indeed the war itself seem centuries away. 
The post-war chaos has made us forget the details 
of the days when careful English housewives were 
loading their store cupboards with food, when a 
moratorium was proclaimed, when gold sovereigns 
disappeared never to appear again, when the old 
easy order of life came to an abrupt end and a new 
and far less comfortable order took its place. 

Thinking back one remembers with astonishment 
the irrational optimism that followed the landing 
of the British army in France. I remember how 
we all believed that the German rush would be 
stopped at Lie'ge. I remember how we all believed 
that the French would succeed in overrunning Al- 
sace-Lorraine. Our ignorance of the conditions was 
pitiful. We knew nothing of the incompetence of 
the French leadership in those early days. We 
knew nothing and less than nothing. And when 
Hamilton Fyfe, the "Times" War Correspondent, 
sent a message in which General French's forces 
were described as "a retreating and a broken army," 
Mr. Britling and the rest of us were stunned 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

But English optimism was hard to destroy. The 
idea of Zeppelins over London seemed ridiculous 
to Mr. Britling and to the rest of us — until they 
came. 

In 1915 England was consciously patriotic for 
the first time since the reign of Elizabeth. All the 
men who really mattered became soldiers or at least 
offered themselves for soldiers, often to be rejected. 
The women sent away the men they loved. It would 
have been shameful in 1915 for an Englishwoman 
to love a shirker. Mr. Britling's secretary went and 
then his son, a boy of seventeen, went too. 

In describing the mood in which this boy marched 
away from home, Wells is describing the prevail- 
ing mood of all that was best in England's youth, 
the mood of young men like Rupert Brooke and 
Julian Grenfell, and a host of others, for whom the 
war was to mean death, and to whose passing we 
owe the pitiful fact that post-war England is an 
arid, half hopeless country. I quote Hugh Britling: 

I think the whole business is a bore. Ger- 
many seems to me now just like some heavy hor- 
rible dirty mass that has fallen across Belgium 
and France. We've got to shove the stuff back 
again. That's all. . . . You know I can't 
get up a bit of tootle about this business. . . . 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

I think killing people or getting killed is a 
thoroughly nasty habit. 

Mr. Britling's next war experience was to be that 
of host to a family of Belgian refugees. The story 
of the Belgian refugees in England will probably 
never be written in detail but, with few exceptions, 
it is certainly true that their hosts paid dearly for 
their kindness. It has always seemed to me one of 
the many ironies of the war that England came into 
it to protect the national rights of a small people 
whose citizens, long before the war ended, were 
generally heartily detested both by the English and 
the French. The vicar of Mr. Britling's parish put 
up "some sort of journalist and quite an atheist." 

"He goes out," he says, "looking for a cafe*. 
He never finds a cafe but he certainly finds 
every public house within a radius of miles. 
And he comes back smelling dreadfully of beer. 
When I drop a Little Hint, he blames the beer. 
He says it is not good beer — our good Essex 
beer. He doesn't understand any of our simple 
ways. He's sophisticated. The girls about 
here wear Belgian flags — and air their little 
bits of French. And he takes it as an encourage- 
ment. Only yesterday there was a scene. . . . 
But anyhow, . . . I'm better off than poor 
dear Mrs. Bynne. She secured two milliners. 
128 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

She insisted upon them. And their clothes were 
certainly beautifully made. . . . She thought 
two milliners would be so useful with a large 
family like hers. They certainly said they were 
milliners. But it seems — I don't know what 
we shall do about them. . . . My dear Mr. 
Britling those young women are anything but 
milliners — anything but milliners." 

There was very little bitterness in England at 
the beginning of the war. There was a general 
belief that war had been forced on the German 
people by their aggressive rulers and that many of 
the Germans would welcome an allied victory as 
a means of securing a Liberal Democratic Govern- 
ment. There was a general disinclination to believe 
the stories of atrocities and when the Hymn of Hate 
was first translated into English it was read with 
bewildered astonishment. That was at the begin- 
ning. But hatred begets hatred and soon there were 
spy hunts in England and a mighty change in the 
nation's mind. 

Months passed and Hugh Britling, who had like 
thousands of other English boys lied about his age, 
was sent out to France. The boy realised that he 
was going from one life to another in all respects 
different. 

s» 129 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

There's no real death over here. It's laid out 
and boxed up . . . and there ; it's like another 
planet. It's outside. . . . I'm going out- 
side. . . . Instead of there being no death 
anywhere, it is death everywhere, outside there. 
We shall be using our utmost wits to kill each 
other. 

The boys went away and the older men were left 
at home to face, with aching anxiety in their hearts, 
rising prices and falling incomes, to know that every 
week some frightfully expensive blunder was made, 
and that, over and over again, victory was missed 
through the incapacity of the staffs. 

Britling's secretary was reported "Wounded and 
Missing" and then came the fatal telegram telling 
Britling that his son was killed. England grew 
very familiar with those telegrams. It came to be 
considered bad form to ask men at the club about 
their boys at the Front. It was unfair. If the 
worst had really happened, as it so often had, the 
question made it harder for the man to keep that 
stiff upper lip which is England's pride. The Eng- 
lishwoman was more dramatic, more resentful. The 
secretary had a young wife. The words "Wounded 
and Missing" brought with them a horrible wearing 
uncertainty. The idea that her young husband 
130 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

might be dead seemed to the girl to be the con- 
demnation of the whole scheme of things. 

You see, if he is dead, then cruelty is the law 
and someone must pay me for his death. . . . 
Someone must pay me. ... I shall wait for 
six months after the war, dear, and then I shall 
go off to Germany and learn my way about 
there. And I will murder some German. Not 
just a common German but a German who 
belongs to the guilty kind. A sacrifice. . . . 
I shall prefer German children. I shall sacri- 
fice them to Teddy. 

This was not a very common mood, but it did 
exist. Britling took his loss in a different spirit. 
He declared that he was neither angry nor de- 
pressed, only "bitterly hurt" by the ending of some- 
thing fine, by the death of a boy of eighteen. The 
man was not content to grieve. It was folly that 
had killed his son, the human stupidity at which 
Wells has girded in all his books, and which came 
to a frantic head during the war. And it was the 
business of every sane man to end such folly, 
to prevent further sacrifices on the altar of a Moloch 
of criminal stupidity. 

Then, in his bitter sorrow, Mr. Britling found 
God. This is the vital change in the Wells philo- 
131 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

sophy caused by the war. This is the "considerable 
progress" which he claims for himself. The God 
he found is not an omnipotent God. He is not 
responsible for the horrors of human life, but some- 
day He will triumph and then horror will cease. 
There is cruelty and injustice and aggression in 
the world but there is also kindness and goodness 
and love and these are the signs of God, the God 
who struggles, the God who will ultimately prevail. 

Heinrich, the German tutor, was killed too. Mr. 
Britling heard the news from a friend in Norway 
and he wrote a long letter to Heinrich's father and 
mother sending them some snap-shots in one of 
which his boy and theirs were taken together. 
"They are, you see, smiling very pleasantly at each 
other." 

After he had written his letter, Mr. Britling sat 
for hours in deep, pained thought. The folly must 
be destroyed for the sake of the dead boys and it 
was the dead boys who had shown the way in which 
the folly could really be destroyed. They "have 
shown us God." This is the conclusion. "Religion 
is the first thing and the last thing and until a man 
has found God and been found by God he begins at 
no beginning, he works to no end." 

It is said that men have always created Gods 
132 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

in their own image. This means that men have 
always contrived to find the Gods that they need. 
Wells's God is his own God, with characteristics 
which I shall summarise in the next chapter. Here 
the point of interest is that it was the war that con- 
vinced him that without the help of some God 
there could be no hope of the conquest of folly and 
evil, no possibility of creating the World State. 

It would be untrue to suggest that the war con- 
vinced the mass of the people of England, or of 
any other country, of the need of God. In this 
respect Wells cannot be taken as typical of his 
nation. His fellows shared his bewilderment but 
a very few of them shared his discovery. That is 
what always happens. The man with the super- 
acute vision first sees the light. He discovers the 
way out. He is the pioneer. Perhaps his fellows 
will listen to him, perhaps they will follow, though 
there is little evidence of any such thing happening 
here in England in 1922. 

In "The Soul of a Bishop" Wells asserts that 
however evil the war may have been, it was at least 
something great, infinitely the greatest thing that 
had happened in the lives of the people who were 
living in England in 1914. It forced such of them 
as had imagination and power of understanding 
133 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

for the first time to realise "the epic quality of 
history and their own relationship to the destinies 
of the race." 

All the comfortable certainties of material life 
disappeared. Even the most unadventurous were 
compelled to recognise that life might be an 
adventure with infinite perils. This happened at 
the beginning. As the war went on and Zeppelins 
and Gothas dropped bombs in city streets and 
surburban back gardens, the sense of security, 
which the English had hugged to their bosoms for 
centuries, was destroyed, once and for all. I do 
not suggest that there will be no more wars. I do 
not even suggest that England may not, perhaps 
within an approximately short time, be involved in 
another war. But if war does occur, the non-com- 
batants will know that death is almost as likely for 
them as for the soldier in the fighting line. 

Such is the curious mentality of the English, that 
this knowledge will probably not make for perma- 
nent peace, for the one curious fact that the Great 
War proved was that very few men and probably 
very few women are really afraid of death. When 
the Zeppelins first came to London the streets were 
crowded. The people of London had never seen 
a Zeppelin before. It was a strange and beauti- 
134 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ful sight and curiosity was far greater than 
fear. 

In "The Soul of a Bishop," Wells notes that the 
outbreak of war was followed by an unprecedented 
national solidarity. Quarrels and controversies 
were forgotten. All classes were eager to perform 
some sort of genuine national service. This mood 
did not last. It ended long before the war ended, 
but while it existed, it was a suggestive and hearten- 
ing phenomenon. If the people of one nation could 
be persuaded always to realise that they were 
members one of the other, then the Wells World 
State would not be little more than a misty dream. 
Unhappily, it would seem that national solidarity 
can only be realised in face of some great peril and 
(so evil is the human heart) that it is likely to 
vanish into thin air before the peril has disappeared. 

Wells returns to the war in the latter part of 
"Joan and Peter." Peter and his guardian were 
in Berlin just before the war broke out and in 
Berlin they saw the Kaiser, that curious significant 
and sinister figure, who, probably unjustly, will 
represent for ever the malevolent influences that 
made the war inevitable. Wells describes him very 
finely as: "Something melodramatic, something 
eager and in a great hurry, something that went by 
135 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

like the sounds of a trumpet, a figure of vast enter- 
prise in shining armour. . . . Something very- 
modern and yet romantic, something stupendously 
resolute . . . going magnificently somewhere." 

Peter, the keen boy in his early twenties, is 
obsessed with the futility of the pre-war world. In 
it he finds nothing but "muddle and muck and non- 
sense indescribable." The whole world is suffering 
from boredom, "boring on to decay." The war 
came and of course nothing was ready. The 
country for all its patriotic enthusiasm was just "a 
crowd adrift." This is quite true but I do not think 
that Wells has sufficiently recorded the extra- 
ordinary power of improvisation shown by the 
British people in 1915. An essentially unmilitary 
people became militarist. A people much inclined 
to repeat Johnson's gibe at patriotism, became self- 
sacrificingly patriotic. An indolent pleasure-lov- 
ing people became frantically industrious. 

There is no parallel in the history of the world 
to the creation of Kitchener's Army, which, led with 
tragic inefficiency, faced death calmly and 
humorously at Loos in September, 1915, and in the 
summer of 1916 was the British Army that routed 
the Germans on the Somme. There is nothing in 
history quite parallel to the national service ren- 
136 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

dered by Englishwomen in a thousand different 
ways from 1915 till the end of the war. It is 
natural that Wells should emphasise the general 
unreadiness to meet a great danger and the appall- 
ing stupidity in high places, but it cannot be denied 
that the real people of England, the people whom 
Dickens loved and to whom Wells belongs, 
demonstrated not only courage but amazing in- 
telligence in swiftly adapting themselves to new 
conditions and arming themselves to face a peril 
of which they had never dreamt. 

The intelligence of the people was sufficient to 
overcome the steady, invincible stupidity that 
dominated the War Office at the beginning, turned 
victory into defeat a score of times and flourished 
in brass hats when at last the Armistice came. The 
English people not only helped to beat the Ger- 
mans, they temporarily conquered the stupidity of 
their own rulers. "Youth," says Wells, "grew wise 
very fast in those tremendous days." And aver- 
age middle age and even old age grew wise with 
youth, though it is all too true that "no story of 
these years can ever be true that does not pass 
under a shadow." 

The conscientious objectors were a strange and 
unpleasant phenomenon in the England of the war 
137 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

and Wells has written in "Joan and Peter" a biting 
picture of the "advanced" minority who refused to 
march with their fellows. With curious inconsist- 
ency, these strange folk have, for the most part, 
been busy since the war stirring up revolution, 
apparently believing that no war is justifiable ex- 
cept civil war. Wells's conscientious objectors 
were the Sheldricks. 

The Sheldricks were like seedlings that begin 
flourishing and then damp off. . . . Energy 
leaked out of them with adolescence. They 
seemed to possess the vitality for positive con- 
victions no longer, and they displayed a dis- 
tinctive hostility to any wave of popular feeling 
that threatened to swamp their weak but still 
obstinate individuality. Their general attitude 
towards life was one of protesting refractori- 
ness. Whatever it was that people believed or 
did, you were given to understand by under- 
tones and abstinences that the Sheldricks knew 
better and, for the most exquisite reasons, 
didn't. All their friends were protesters and 
rebels and seceders, or incomprehensible poets or 
incapable artists. And from the first the war 
was altogether too big and too strong for them. 
Confronted by such questions as to whether 
fifty years of belligerent preparation culminat- 
ing in the most cruel and wanton invasion of 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

a peaceful country it is possible to imagine, was 
to be resisted by mankind or condoned, the 
Sheldricks fell back upon the counter state- 
ment that Sir Edward Grey, being a land- 
owner, was necessarily just as bad as the 
German Junker, or that the Government of 
Russia was an unsatisfactory one. 

This is the Wells conclusion of the matter, the 
moral of the war, as Wells saw it a year or so 
before it came to an end. Thousands of British 
lives had been wasted. Victory had continually 
been deferred by the British contempt of thought 
and science and organisation. Stupidity in large 
matters, stupidity in small matters. Smug self- 
sufficiency that allowed advantages to be lost. Pro- 
fessional pride that refused to listen to lay warn- 
ings. And all the time, a people, stout at heart and 
instinct with humour and common-sense, the com- 
mon English people, the Sam Weller England, 
that saved the English gentlemen from the fate of 
their Russian brothers. 

That was the war as far as England was con- 
cerned. And for the future? What can save 
England and the world from another such ex- 
perience? Only work and learning. "We cannot 
make terms with any other creed." 
139 



CHAPTER EIGHT 






In 1901, Wells wrote: "Either one must believe 
the universe to be one and systematic, and held 
together by some omnipresent quality, or one must 
believe it to be a casual aggregation, an incoherent 
accumulation with no unity whatsoever outside the 
unity of the personality regarding it. All science 
and most modern religious systems presuppose the 
former, and to believe the former is, to anyone not 
too anxious to quibble, to believe in God. But 
I believe that these prevailing men of the future, 
like many of the saner men of to-day, having so 
formulated their fundamental belief, will presume 
to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no 
possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. 
They will have no positive definition of God at 
all. They will certainly not indulge in 'that some- 
thing, not ourselves that makes for righteousness' 
(not defined) or any defective claptrap of that 
sort." 

To the Wells of twenty years ago, God was only 
140 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"a pervading purpose" — "He comprehends and 
cannot be comprehended and our business is only 
with so much of His purpose as centres on our indi- 
vidual wills." In 1908, Wells published his "First 
and Last Things" which he described as a "Con- 
fession of Faith and Rule of Life." In 1917 — in 
the third year of the war — he published "God the 
Invisible King" and at the same time issued a new 
and revised edition of "First and Last Things." 
In the preface to this new edition Wells wrote: 
"Since 1908 the writer has changed his general 
views but little. There has been little of positive 
retraction in this revision; he has, however, gone 
on very considerably." 

Here is a definite admission that the dramatic, 
tragic and urgent events of the war had their effect 
in hurrying Wells along the road, upon which he 
had already taken the first step, towards the goal 
of faith. Both the artist and the scientist in Wells 
made a belief in some sort of God imperative. The 
scientist declined to believe that this life was utterly 
ineffectual and meaningless. He was convinced 
that he, himself, must be a part, indeed a rather 
important part, in some scheme and it is impossible 
to conceive a scheme that has not emanated from 
the brain of a schemer. Then the artist in Wells 
141 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

was attracted by such fine phrases as the Will of 
God, the Hand of God, the Great Commander. 

In 1908, he was still dreaming of the World 
State, a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, but he 
realised that the philanthropic idealists, whom he 
had drawn in "The New Machiavelli," in "The 
Passionate Friends" and in "Marriage," were 
certain from the beginning to fail because "they 
relied for their strength upon themselves." Success 
can only come when "the impulse to serve mankind 
comes from a source outside of and greater than 
one's individual good intentions," — the very "some- 
thing not ourselves making for righteousness," at 
which Wells had jeered seven years before. 

Wells continually anticipated the possibility of 
a great war that should vitally affect the life of the 
western world and possibly threaten the continu- 
ance of its civilisation, though even his prophetic 
vision could not anticipate the long drawn out 
struggle, and the complete economic chaos that has 
followed victory and defeat. During the war Wells 
lost faith in the power of man to reach that heaven 
of his heart's desire which he calls the World State 
without extraneous aid. 

The stupidity, the narrow vision, the wickedness 
in high places that made western Europe a 
142 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

shambles from August, 1914 to November, 1918 
made it impossible for him to believe that man, 
without some radical change of mind and spirit, 
will ever be able to work out his own salvation. 
The war made our boasted progress a sham, and 
compelled us to realise that in all essentials man- 
kind was in practically the same position as it was 
centuries before. 

The impetus therefore towards regeneration must 
be sought outside man himself. In "God the In- 
visible King," Wells goes back to the familiar 
evangelical position that society can only be saved 
by individuals who have been saved, individuals 
who have experienced a change of heart and have 
been born again. The indefiniteness and the in- 
numerable qualifications of 1908 have been thrown 
overboard. 

Wells sets out his new position with admirable 
courage and clearness of expression. "This," he 
says, "is a religious book written by a believer" — 
a believer who rejects the triune God of orthodox 
Christianity but who has complete faith in God 
the Redeemer. Wells asserts that the word "God" 
is used for two entirely different Beings, the out- 
ward God, the creator of the world, ruling perhaps 
with justice but certainly without affection, and 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

the God of the Human Heart. These two con- 
ceptions of God appear in the Trinity as the Father 
and the Son. Even as a mystical metaphor Wells 
cannot accept the relationship. 

To him the Creator is a Veiled Being and he 
asserts that we do not know and perhaps cannot 
know in any comprehensible term the relation of 
the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives 
who is, in his terminology, the true God. Wells 
points out that many of the Christian sects that 
existed before the publication of the Nicene Creed 
believed that the God of the Human Heart, the 
Christ God, and the God of nature were bitter 
antagonists and that this also was the belief of 
Shelley. 

Wells does not consider that the relationship 
between the two Gods is of any real importance. 
It is only the God of the Human Heart that mat- 
ters to mankind. The God that is Almighty, 
omniscient and omnipresent has little interest for 
him. His God is the maker neither of heaven nor 
of earth but He is a God of Salvation — "a spirit, a 
person, a strongly marked and noble personality, 
loving, inspiring, and lovable who exists or strives 
to exist in every human soul." 

The Life Force, the Will to Live, with which 
144 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Bernard Shaw is so concerned and which is a mat- 
ter of enormous interest to philosophers unable to 
conceive the idea of God at all, is, Wells suggests, 
an emanation from the Veiled Being with no con- 
nection whatever with the God of the Heart. "God 
comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the 
pride of life but as a still small voice within. . . . 
He is the immortal part and the leader of 
mankind." 

No man by reasoning can find out God. This 
is the mystical defiance of the scientific spirit and 
Wells the scientist accepts the statement as being 
absolutely and fundamentally true. The realisa- 
tion of God comes suddenly, mysteriously, the reply 
to a deep yearning need. 

It is the attainment of an absolute certainty 
that one is not alone in oneself. It is as if one 
was touched at every point by a being akin to 
oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, 
steadfast and pure in aim. It is completer and 
more intimate, but it is like standing side by side 
with and touching someone that we love very 
dearly and trust completely. It is as if this 
being bridged a thousand misunderstandings 
and brought us into fellowship with a great 
multitude of other people. . . . 

10 145 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 
than hands and feet." 

Wells claims that his idea of God is identical with 
the Christian idea of the risen Christ but he will 
not identify his God with the man Jesus. He 
does not even admit that Jesus was the founder of 
our faith. In "The Outline of History" he says 
that it was the followers of Jesus who founded the 
great universal religion of Christianity and in "God 
the Invisible King" he constantly traces back the 
doctrines of orthodox Christianity to the Nicene 
Creed and particularly to the "little red-haired 
busy wire-pulling Athanasius" for whom, as E. 
T. Raymond has pointed out, Wells has a partic- 
ularly fierce hatred. 

He accepts neither Christian theology nor the 
Christian ethic in its entirety. To him, quietism is 
a damnable heresy. The finding of God is not 
"an escape from life and action; it is the release of 
life and action from the prison of the mortal self." 
The Wells God is militant. His followers must 
also be militant and aggressive. 

Wells quotes with approval a statement by the 
present Bishop of Manchester that, owing to the 
war, men have gained faith "in Christ as an heroic 
146 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

leader." They think of Him less as being just 
meek and gentle and they remember the vision of 
Him which says: — "He had in His right hand seven 
stars ; and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two- 
edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun 
shineth in his strength." 

The whole idea of God is meaningless to Wells 
unless He constantly incites towards vehement 
endeavour in the fight for a better world. In this 
respect, Wells's conception of God is much the 
same as Queen Elizabeth's in Miss Clemence Dane's 
play "Will Shakespeare": 

I'll not bow 
To the gentle Jesus of the women, I — 
But to the man who hung twixt earth and heaven 
Six mortal hours, and knew the end (as strength 
And custom was) three days away, yet ruled 
His soul and body so, that when the sponge 
Blessed his cracked lips with promise of relief 
And quick oblivion, He would not drink: 
He turned His head away and would not drink: 
Spat out the anodyne and would not drink. 
This was a God for Kings and Queens of pride, 
And Him I follow. 

Commenting on Wells's discovery of God, 
Gilbert Chesterton has written: 

He called his book "God the Invisible King" ; 
but the curious point was that he specially in- 
147 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

sisted that his God differed from other peoples' 
God in the very fact that He was not a king. 
He was very particular in explaining that his 
deity did not rule in any Almighty or Infinite 
sense, but merely influenced, like any wander- 
ing spirit. Nor was He particularly invisible, 
if there can be said to be any degrees in invisi- 
bility. Mr. Wells's Invisible God was really like 
Mr. Wells's Invisible Man. You almost felt 
He might appear at any moment, at any rate 
to His one devoted worshipper; and that, as in 
old Greece, a glad cry might ring through the 
woods of Essex, the voice of Mr. Wells crying, 
"We have seen, He hath seen us, a visible God." 

Mr. Chesterton says that the Wells religion is 
"the selection of a single spirit out of many there 
might be in the spiritual world," and that its trend 
is "to polytheism rather as it existed in the old 
civilisation of Paganism." 

I have quoted this criticism by a witty orthodox 
writer because it puts very clearly the fundamental 
difference between Christianity and the Wells 
religion — a difference which Wells himself is eager 
to emphasise. But in one respect Chesterton's 
criticism is distinctly unfair. Wells does not sug- 
gest that each human heart may be its own private 
God helping towards righteousness, kindliness and 
148 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

a useful life. His creed is that there is at our 
elbows a God of the Human Heart, ready to help 
all of us, if we invite His aid. 

Wells makes the rather curious suggestion that 
children have no natural love for God and no need 
of Him, while God on His side does not clamour 
for children's attention. "He is not like one of those 
senile uncles who dream of glory in the nursery." 
He suggests that children should just be told that 
God is a great friend whom some day they will need 
and know. The need comes with adolescence. 

The love of man for God is pure exaltation. The 
love of God for man is austere. "God must love 
His followers as a great captain loves his men, who 
are foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding 
and yet whose faith alone makes Him possi- 
ble. . . . The spirit of God will not hesitate to 
send us to torment and bodily death." Man is won 
from the enemy often only after a fearful struggle 
and "we come staggering through into the golden 
light of His Kingdom, to fight for His Kingdom 
henceforth until we are altogether taken up into 
His being." 

It is impossible to believe in God as the Invisible 
King without at once dreaming of the coming 
Kingdom of God on earth — Wells's World State. 
149 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

The consequence of this conception is that the indi- 
vidual is filled with the desire to make himself a 
fit citizen for such a state and to devote his entire 
energy to the creation of such a state. 

The citizenship demands the same character and 
conduct which Wells gives to his Samurai in "A 
Modern Utopia." He tells us almost in the words 
used every Sunday in every Christian pulpit that 
the power of God can work miracles to change 
habits and character. The will to prevail over 
natural vices is buttressed by a boundless strength 
outside the individual. Man cannot be damned 
when he has once found God. He may sin seventy 
times seven but he will still be forgiven. "Nothing 
but utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off 
from God. . . . There is no sin, no state that 
being regretted and repented of, can stand between 
God and man." 

In "A Modern Utopia" Wells says: "The lead- 
ing principle of the Utopian religion is the re- 
pudiation of the doctrine of original sin; the 
Utopians hold that man on the whole is good. That 
is their cardinal belief." There is nothing to show 
that Wells has abandoned this Utopian faith, but 
it is clear that if he still holds that man is good, he 
has also learned that man is weak, unable to play 
150 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

liis proper part in the drama of life without mystical 
help. 

Wells professes to be unconcerned with the ques- 
tion of personal immortality. To the man who has 
faith death can have no terror. And while he 
admits that the death of those we love is hard to 
understand and harder still to endure, he, at least, 
finds no consolation in believing that they still exist 
"in some disembodied and incomprehensible else- 
where, changed and yet not done." The dead 
whom we have loved are immortal memories for us 
who remain. 

In a beautifully written passage — "First and 
Last Things" — Wells refers to his own friends 
whom he has loved and who are here no more, and 
he laughs to scorn the idea that a man like the late 
W. E. Henley could "conceivably be tapping at 
the underside of a mahogany table or scratching 
stifled incoherence into a locked slate." If, Wells 
says, Henley were to find himself at a Spiritualistic 
stance he would "instantly smash the table with 
that big fist of his." 

The post-war world, with its heavy cohorts of 

mourners whose grief becomes little more bearable 

as the years go on, has naturally endeavoured to 

find consolation in the idea that the dead can come 

151 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

back to us and that actual communion can take 
place between the two sides of the veil. One might 
have more faith if the means of communications 
were less suggestive of trickery and the communica- 
tions themselves were less banal. As it is, one cannot 
escape the conviction that the present outbreak of 
Spiritualism is one of the many evils the world is 
paying for the greatest blunder in history. It is 
well to have one loud strident common-sense voice 
in the world of spooks and shadows. 

Wells's criticism does not touch the greater, finer 
belief of immortality in a greater, finer world, 
where the wicked cease from troubling and the 
weary are at rest. There is courage and inspiration 
in the following comment on death. 

When we have loved to the intensest point, we 
have done our best with each other. To keep that 
image of the inn, we must not sit over long at 
our wine beside the fire. We must go on to new 
experiences and new adventure. Death comes 
to part us and turn us out and set us on the 
road again. 

But the dead stay where we leave them. 

So as the late Professor Clifford said: "Let 
us joins hands and help one another, for to-day 
we are here together." 
152 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"The Soul of a Bishop" is a sort of dramatised 
development of "God the Invisible King." No 
man can conceivably write as much as Wells has 
written without often falling far below his best, 
without sometimes writing a book that honest 
criticism must write down as a failure. Both "The 
Passionate Friends" and "The Wife of Sir Isaac 
Harman" are failures, and so to an even greater 
degree is "The Soul of a Bishop." 

To me, "God the Invisible King" is intensely 
interesting, the revelation of the adventures of a 
brave and original thinker, searching for a basis of 
faith, with a determination to find that basis, even 
if at the end he finds it necessary to create it for 
himself. But when in "The Soul of a Bishop," 
Wells uses his personal search for the truth and 
his individual conclusions as the background for a 
novel, the result is irritating and the novel certainly 
has no chance of any artistic existence. In "The 
History of Mr. Polly" Wells shows that he has 
abundant humour. The discovery of God seems 
to have in some unfortunate way robbed him of 
his humour, else surely he would never have im- 
agined the tiresome priggish Bishop of Princhester 
and the extraordinarily foolish Lady Sunderbund. 

In "The Soul of a Bishop" Wells repeats his 
153 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

belief in the existence of two Gods, never necessarily 
in harmony, possibly in opposition to each other. 
The Gnostics had this same belief. 

They said that the God in your heart is the 
rebel against the God beyond the stars, that the 
Christ in your heart is like Prometheus — or 
Hiawatha — or any other of the sacrificial gods, 
a rebel. He arises out of man. He rebels 
against the High God of the stars and crystals 
and poisons and monsters and of the dead 
emptiness of space. 

Practically all religions have striven to tell some- 
thing of the relationship that exists between these 
two Gods. But this is a matter beyond the power 
of the human brain to understand and man, Wells 
insists, must be content to know the God whom he 
can hug to his heart. "He is courage, He is 
adventure, He is the King, He fights for you and 
with you against death." 






154 



CHAPTER NINE 

Since the war, Wells has published a novel, "The 
Undying Fire," "The Outline of History," "Russia 
in the Shadows," "The Salvaging of Civilisation" 
and "Washington and the Hope of Peace." As I 
am writing this book, "The Secret Places of the 
Heart" is appearing serially in a magazine and for 
obvious reasons this story must remain outside my 
survey. 

"The Undying Fire" was published in the sum- 
mer of 1919, at the time when the Treaty of Ver- 
sailles was signed, to bring more trouble into an 
already sufficiently troubled world. The story is 
moulded on the Book of Job. 

Wells's Job is a Norfolk schoolmaster round 
whose unlucky head a wilderness of misfortune ac- 
cumulates — an epidemic, an explosion in the school 
laboratory, the loss of his savings and finally a 
terrible illness which a doctor tells him is cancer. 
Job is staying in uncomfortable lodgings with a 
nagging wife when his "comforters" arrive to try 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

him still further. But Wells's Job is a big man. 
He has looked out on the world and seen the real 
cause of the pain, the failure and the hopes deferred. 
He is indignant with the common shallow thinking 
and the cowardly running away from problems. 
He scorns the notion common in 1919 that we had 
won the war in order to take "the place of the 
Germans as the champion-bullies of the world." 
He is indignant that the majority have learned 
nothing from the war and that "they are being their 
unmitigated selves more than ever." His thoughts 
turn to the use of poison gas during the war and he 
asks "Why do men do such things?" He answers 
his own question: 

They do not do it out of a complete and 
organised impulse to evil. If you took the series 
of researches and inventions that led at last to 
this use of poison gas, you would find they were 
the work of a multitude of mainly amiable, fairly 
virtuous, and kindly meaning men. Each one 
was doing his bit. . . . Each one . . . was 
being himself and utilising the gift that was in 
him in accordance with the drift of the world 
about him; each one . . . was modestly 
taking the world as he found it. They were 
living in an uninformed world with no common 
understanding and no collective plan, a world 
156 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ignorant of its true history, and with no con- 
ception of its future. Into the horrors they 
drifted for the want of a world education. Out 
of these horrors no lesson will be learnt, no will 
can arise, for the same reason. Every man lives 
ignorantly in his own circumstances, from hand 
to mouth, from day to day, swayed first of all 
by this catchword and then by that. 

"The Undying Fire" is a fine book, an invaluable 
comment, a bitter record of post-war disillusion- 
ment. The characters are discussed with abundant 
humour. The hand that wrote "The History of 
Mr. Polly" has not lost its cunning. The end of 
the story is happy and human. 

This novel has an important place in the develop- 
ment of the Wells philosophy and may properly be 
regarded both as an introduction to "The Salvag- 
ing of Civilisation" and an explanation of the 
reasons that induced Wells to write "The Outline 
of History." With the rest of us, he had believed 
that great fundamental lessons would be learned 
from the experiences of the war. The wild pro- 
fiteering orgies that followed the Armistice and 
the muddled hesitation of the Peace Congress 
showed that he (and the rest of us) were wrong. 
Far from the World State being nearer, it seemed 
157 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

farther away than ever and Wells concludes that 
there can be no permanent peace on earth, no 
resolute well devised attempt to deal with indus- 
trial evils, no World State without a new World 
Education. Common understanding and collective 
plans will only be possible when the men of all 
nations have learned from the history of the past 
their near relation to each other. 

Having learned the past, having surveyed the 
road over which they have travelled, men will then 
have some chance of laying out the new road, of 
tramping together towards a haven where common- 
sense shall conquer stupidity and good intent shall 
be victorious over cruelty and oppression. Such a 
haven is a real possibility. "Quite a few resolute 
men could set mankind definitely towards such a 
state of affairs so that they could reach it in a dozen 
generations or so." 

"The Outline of History" was published in 1920. 
This amazing work which has vastly increased 
Wells's fame both in England and in America is 
of so great importance and interest that I propose 
to devote a special chapter to its consideration. 

In the same year, Wells went to Russia to see 
for himself the actual workings of a Communist 
State. His observations are recorded in his 
158 






AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

"Russia in the Shadows." It would not be relevant 
to my purpose here to quote Wells's opinion of 
Lenin and Trotsky or even of Karl Marx whose 
much bewhiskered busts, to be seen everywhere in 
Bolshevist Russia, caused him the most acute annoy- 
ance. He insists that the present unhappy con- 
dition of Russia is to be traced to causes that may 
bring about a similar state of affairs in other coun- 
tries. It was first the war and then "the moral and 
intellectual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy 
people" that brought Russia to its present state of 
misery. The ruling and wealthy class is morally 
and intellectually insufficient in other countries — 
in Great Britain and even in America — and so long 
as it is allowed to rule, to waste and to quarrel, so 
long must civilisation be imperilled. 

Wells is still an Evolutionary Collectivism "I 
believe," he says, "that through a vast sustained 
educational campaign the existing capitalist system 
can be civilised into a Collectivist world system." 
On the other hand, Lenin, with whom he had a long 
conversation in Moscow, believes that capitalism is 
"incurably predatory, wasteful and unteachable." 
It must be absolutely destroyed. The world must 
be rid of it before anything better can be created. 

Between the two points of view there is complete 
159 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

and irreconcilable hostility and Wells found in 
Russia pedantic intolerance, foolish blindness to 
human need, and not a little incapacity in high 
places. But he has this in common with Lenin 
that both of them have "a vision of a world changed 
over and planned and built afresh." 

Russia seemed to him to be suffering from an 
irreparable breakdown. He left the country with 
the conviction that, for the time anyhow, the 
Bolshevist Government is the only possible govern- 
ment and he contends that, unless the rest of Europe 
co-operates in helping Russia to reconstruct, the 
ruin of that great Eastern half of Europe will 
eventually ensure the complete economic ruin of the 
whole of Europe. Never were nations more 
mutually dependent, never were the rulers of the 
nations readier to disregard that vital fact. 

In 1921, Wells published "The Salvaging of 
Civilisation." Before the war and even during 
the war, Wells was something of an optimist. He 
was able to believe that folly would ultimately be 
conquered and that cruelty would be one day 
trampled under foot. The Peace of Versailles and 
the consequences of the Peace left him with vastly 
diminished faith. In "The Salvaging of Civilisa- 
tion" he said: 

160 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

This world of mankind seems to me to be a 
very sinister and dreadful world. It has come 
to this — that I open my newspaper every morn- 
ing with a sinking heart, and usually I find little 
to console me. 

Wells does not, however, sorrow as those entirely 
without hope. The title of his book implies that he 
has a plan of salvation — the old plan of salvation 
set forth a dozen times before. Joseph Chamberlain 
told us to think Imperially. Wells bids us think 
Europeanly if we would be saved. 

If Europe is to be saved from ultimate dis- 
aster Europe has to stop thinking in terms of 
the people of France, the people of England, 
the people of Germany, the French, the Brit- 
ish, the Germans, and so forth. Europe has to 
think at least of the people of Europe, if not of 
the civilised people of the world. If we Euro- 
peans cannot bring our minds to that, there is no 
hope for us. Only by thinking of all peoples can 
any people be saved in Europe. Fresh wars 
will destroy the social fabric of Europe, and 
Europe will perish as nations, fighting. 

Wells compares the state of Europe, with its 
multiplication of frontiers, its differences of lan- 
guage and of currency, its custom-houses and its 
161 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

international jealousies, with the happy one-ness of 
the United States. 

The world has never seen before a community 
like the United States and there is, Wells says, the 
same difference between the United States and a 
country like France as there is between an automo- 
bile and a one-horse shay. The American lives in a 
huge political unity. Europe is being strangled by 
a net of boundaries. American patriotism is a con- 
tinental patriotism. European patriotism is very 
often nothing but parochial patriotism. 

The Peace, instead of helping towards the crea- 
tion of confederacies of nations, has created a 
number of small weak states, each with its own 
boundary, each with its custom-houses, each with 
its own currency. The encouragement of these 
petty patriotisms makes the possibility of war 
greater. 

"Every country in Europe," says Wells, "is its 
own Sinn Fein cultivating that silly obsession of 
Ourselves Alone." He adds: "Ourselves Alone is 
the sure guide to conflict and disaster, to want, 
misery, violence, degradation and death for our 
children and our children's children — until our race 
is dead." 

The horrible possibilities of a second world war 
162 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

must be obvious to everyone. There was a definite 
increase in frightfulness and destructiveness during 
the course of the last war, and the next war will 
begin far beyond the point where the last war 
finished. "The victor in the next great war will 
be bombed from the air, starved and depleted 
almost as much as the loser. His victory will be 
no easy one ; it will be a triumph of the exhausted 
and dying over the dead." 

The conditions, that have brought wars about 
in the past, still continue and have, to some extent, 
been aggravated by the Peace and by the events 
since the Peace. Civilised society is, as Wells in- 
sists, in danger of complete destruction and this 
destruction can only be averted by conscious, 
systematic reconstruction. 

The comparison between the LTnited Sates and 
European countries leads Wells to plead for the 
creation of the United States of Europe, but this 
would only be a step towards the World State, for 
"if we work for unity on the large scale we are 
contemplating we may as well work for World 
Unity." 

The League of Nations is all very well in its 
way but "it has no unity, no personality." The 
World State would be a reality, something that 
163 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

could arouse enthusiasm, something that could 
kindle a fine, inspiring and all-embracing patriot- 
ism. In his former books, Wells was content 
to leave the World State as a vague ideal. In "The 
Salvaging of Civilisation" he suggests the actual 
government for such a State. The World State 
will be ruled by a World Council which Wells 
imagines will be "a very taciturn assembly." It 
will not meet very often and its members will gener- 
ally communicate their views to each other by 
notes. 

There will be a Supreme Court determining 
not International Law, but World Law. There 
will be a growing Code of World Law. 

There will be a world currency. 

There will be a ministry of posts, transport, 
and communications generally. 

There will be a ministry of trade in staple 
products and for the conservation and develop- 
ment of the natural resources of the earth. 

There will be a ministry of social and labour 
conditions. 

There will be a ministry of world health. 

There will be a ministry, the most important 

ministry of all, watching and supplementing 

national educational work and taking up the 

care and stimulation of backward communities. 

164 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

And instead of a War Office and Naval and 
Military departments, there will be a Peace 
Ministry studying the belligerent possibilities of 
every new invention, watching for armed dis- 
turbances everywhere, and having complete con- 
trol of every armed force that remains in the 
world. 

The government of the World State will be 
comparatively simple. There will be no foreign 
enemy, no foreign competition, no foreign tariffs. 
But how is the World State to be created? 

There must be a new universal scheme of educa- 
tion, emphasising human unity, and for this educa- 
tion the world needs a book, a new Bible, carrying 
out, on far more elaborate lines, the idea that in- 
spired Mr. Wells when he wrote his "Outline of 
History." The new Bible of Civilisation must be 
modelled on the old Bible. 

I am taking the Bible as my model. I am 
taking it because twice in history — first as the 
Old Testament, and then again as the Old and 
New Testament together — it has formed a cul- 
ture, and unified and kept together through 
many generations great masses of people. . . . 

Nevertheless, I hope I shall not offend any 
reader if I point out that the Bible is not all we 
165 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

need to-day, and that also in some respects it 
is redundant. Its very virtues created its limita- 
tions. It served men so well that they made a 
Canon of it and refused to alter it further. 
Throughout the most vital phases of Hebrew 
history, throughout the most living years of 
Christian development, the Bible changed and 
grew. Then its growth ceased and its text 
became fixed. But the world went on growing 
and discovering new needs and new necessi- 
ties. . . . 

This new Bible must give men a general history 
of mankind, "the flaming beginnings of our 
world, the vast ages of its making, and the astound- 
ing unfolding in age after age of life." Then it 
must tell a universal history of man, emphasising 
the common development and the intimate relations 
of the various races. Then it must provide Rules 
of Life, Rules of Health, Rules of Conduct. The 
Rules of Conduct will particularly apply to modern 
conditions and from them solutions will be found 
of the industrial conflicts that at present trouble the 
world. 

If we could so moralize the use of property, 

if we could arrive at a clear idea of just what use 

an owner could make of his machinery, or a 

financier could make of his credit, would there 

166 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

de much left of the incessant labour conflicts of 
the present time? For if you will look into it, 
you will find there is hardly ever a labour con- 
flict into which some unsettled question of prin- 
ciple, some unsettled question of the permis- 
sible use of property, does not enter as the final 
and essential dispute. 

Pure literature will be included in Wells's Bible 
and his selection is rather curious — no plays and no 
novels, no long poems, but well selected anthologies 
to be called "The Book of Freedom," "The Book 
of Justice," "The Book of Charity" and so on. 
The scheme of the Wells Bible is certainly 
grandiose. It will probably never be carried out. 
Wells himself asserts that "a common book, a 
book of knowledge and wisdom is the neces- 
sary foundation for any enduring human una- 
nimity," but if the book is never actually put 
together, the idea suggests the insistent necessity 
for a new idea of education for which Wells pleads 
in the last two chapters of "The Salvaging of 
Civilisation." 

The world must develop a better intelligence and 

a better heart and this is hopeless unless the world 

has better schools and a better system of education. 

This summary of Wells's last polemical work shows 

167 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

him in almost the same mood as of twenty years ago. 
He is still preaching salvation by education and as 
far as this book is concerned he has almost forgotten 
the Invisible King, without whose help he has in- 
sisted there can be no salvation. Indeed almost the 
only reference to God in "The Salvaging of Civili- 
sation" is in the paragraph: "The linking reality 
of the World State is much more likely to be not an 
individual but an idea — such an idea as that of the 
human commonweal under the God of all man- 
kind." 

The letters from the Washington Conference, 
published under the title of "Washington and the 
Hope of Peace," are a repetition of warning and a 
reaffirmation of faith. "The catastrophe of 1914 
is still going on. . . . The breakdown is a real 
decay that spreads and spreads. . . . The world's 
economic life, its civilisation, embodied in its great 
towns is disintegrating and collapsing to the strains 
of the modern war threat and of the disunited con- 
trol of modern affairs. . . . War can only be 
made impossible when the powers of the world have 
done what the thirteen original States of the Ameri- 
can Union found they had to do after their inde- 
pendence was won for them and that is set up a 
common law and rule over themselves." 
168 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

There is repeated protest against the particu- 
larism which characterised the Washington Confer- 
ence and is making international amity impossible. 
Wells protests against the boycotting of Germany, 
since if Germany is ruined, most of Europe will be 
ruined and also because Germany has ceased for 
ever to be military. He protests against the boy- 
cotting of Russia mainly because of the great 
service of the Russian armies to the Allies in the 
early days of the war. "The debt of gratitude 
Britain and France owe to Russia's unknown war- 
rior, that poor unhonoured hero and martyr, is 
incalculable." 

The famous criticisms of France were inspired 
by the fact that in Wells's opinion the present policy 
of the French Government is driving his World 
State farther away into the mists of the future. 
Washington sometimes filled him with hope and 
sometimes filled him with disappointment. But he 
left the Conference with a really fine profession of 
faith 

I Know that I believe so firmly in this great 
world at peace that lies so close to our own, 
ready to come into being as our wills turn 
towards it, that I must needs go about this pres- 
ent world of disorder and darkness like an exile 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

doing such feeble things as I can towards the 
world of my desire, now hopefully, now bitterly, 
as the moods may happen until I die. 

The note of hopefulness is struck with splendid 
emphasis in at least two places in these letters. One 
is the assertion: "There is no real necessity about 
either mental or physical miserableness in human 
life." The other: 

Every other gossip tells you that President 
Harding comes from Main Street and repeats 
the story of Mrs. Harding saying, "We're just 
folks." If President Harding is a fair sample 
of Main Street Sinclair Lewis has not told us 
the full story and Main Street is destined to 
save the world. 

That is indeed the simplest and most profound of 
all truths. If the world is ever to be saved, the job 
will have to be done by the people who are "just 
folks." The wise and the wealthy, the ambitious 
and the highly-placed have had a long innings and 
a precious mess they have made of things. If the 
simple men of the world could meet together in an 
international conference — not the pushing politi- 
cians or the doctrinaire reformers or the busy little 
bureaucrats — but the men, content with their homes 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

and their gardens and their families and their books, 
who live on good terms with their neighbour and 
covet none of his goods, who rejoice in good fel- 
lowship and in friendship and are pleased with 
simple pleasures — if these men who are to be found 
in every country in the world, could sit together 
at Versailles or Washington, at Cannes or Genoa, 
they would speedily find a way of avoiding silly 
quarrels and cruel wars and a means of ensuring 
peace on earth and good will among men. 



171 






CHAPTER TEN 

The text of "The Outline of History" is that 
"there can be no common peace and prosperity 
without common historical ideas." Purely nation- 
alist traditions must be supplanted by the idea that 
history is "the common adventure of all mankind." 

In the past, the Bible supplied the account of this 
common adventure. The men of all nations are 
the children of Adam. The incidents in the his- 
tory of a small Asiatic people are presented as of 
immense significance to the rest of the world. And 
an ethical system is elaborated for the benefit of the 
whole of humanity. While, therefore, the term 
"history" has generally meant for most people 
merely the history of their own country, the Bible 
has supplied a history which all the western peoples 
to some extent regarded as their own, so long as 
the world was ready to believe the mystical story of 
creation and of the fall of man. 

When the scientist proved (or, as I personally 
prefer to say, professed to prove) that man first 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

appeared on earth not as the result of a special 
creation but as the last achievement of a long evo- 
lutionary development, the significance of the Bible 
as universal history was materially lessened. Its 
stories were rejected as fact and merely regarded 
as allegory. 

Wells determined to write a book which should 
fill completely the place that the Bible used to fill 
partially. The Bible begins with the creation of 
man. Wells decided to begin a universal history 
before the creation of man. 

"The Outline of History" is a long book but it 
is, in effect, a very brief telling of a very long story. 
It begins with the first appearance of any sort of 
life on the planet, possibly six hundred million years 
ago, and finishes with the first meeting of the 
League of Nations at Geneva in 1920. 

Even Hilaire Belloc admits that, in the early 
chapters, in which he describes the Making of Man, 
Wells is eminently fair. He is careful to admit the 
uncertainties, to admit that certain statements are 
only guesses, to use the word "probably" over and 
over again. 

I confess that I am one of those people who are 
not quite convinced by the truth of the story of 
evolution as Wells tells it with admirable clearness. 
173 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Of course it may all be true. On the other hand, 
it may not. The links in the chain are unquestion- 
ably often what Hilaire Belloc calls "rusty scraps 
which may or may not be links." 

Wells is strikingly honest but all through the 
story there is, to me, an obvious attempt (and in 
this Wells is only following the example of all the 
evolutionists), to produce evidence to prove a pre- 
conceived theory rather than to let the evidence, 
scanty as it may be, speak for itself. 

The fact of the matter is that we really know 
nothing of what happened on the earth forty thou- 
sand years ago. We know practically nothing of 
what happened before the beginning of recorded his- 
tory. To take one example, ever since the first 
records the Mediterranean Sea has been exactly as 
it is to-day. Wells says that "it is practically certain 
that at the end of the last glacial age the Mediter- 
ranean was a couple of land-locked sea basins." I 
cannot for the life of me appreciate the evidence 
that justifies this assertion, and it seems to me that 
Belloc is perfectly right in his comment that the 
whole thing is guess-work — very fascinating and 
ingenious guess-work, very suggestive and exciting, 
but guess-work for all that. 

The importance of the early chapters in the 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

scheme of the book is that they supply the whole 
human race with a common ancestry. There is a 
picture in chapter ten of a gentleman called the 
"Cro-magnon Man" — the first true man to walk on 
the earth. He and his fellows were, we are told, the 
ancestors of the modern man. Personally I should 
prefer to believe that I was descended from Adam. 
The idea is more picturesque. Wells feels the same 
necessity for supplying us with a common ancestor 
as the poet who wrote the first chapter of Genesis 
felt. Wells, the scientist, has supplied Wells the 
artist with his facts which are set out with such skill 
and simplicity that even the common wayfaring man 
can understand and is interested even when he is 
not convinced. It is admitted that we have a com- 
mon ancestor, anyhow, whether he be Adam or the 
Cro-magnon. 

It is not my purpose to attempt any sort of sum- 
mary of the "Outline." Everything in this one 
book can be found perhaps in a thousand different 
books. All I am attempting to do is to point out 
its significance, to try and discover the object with 
which it was written. The first evident object is to 
give us a popular up-to-date version of the first 
book of Genesis, less poetic, much longer, but 
hardly less interesting. 

175 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

The average historian — particularly the retail 
dealer in historical facts — is never so happy as 
when he can kill romance and when he thinks he 
can prove that romantic stories are not true. These 
people have the same curiously unpleasant joy in 
demonstrating that William Tell never shot an 
arrow through an apple on his son's head as they 
have in asserting that Joan of Arc never heard 
mystical voices urging her to her great mission. 

Wells is a scientist and a terrible fellow for evo- 
lution, but he is poet enough to understand that the 
history of man must be romantic since man himself 
is a creature of fantastic romance. Referring to 
the Trojan wars, he sneers quite properly at the 
"modern writers with modern ideas in their heads" 
who "have tried to make out that the Greeks assailed 
Troy in order to secure a trade route" and he de- 
clares that "the Homeric Greeks were a healthy 
barbaric Aryan people with very poor ideas about 
trade and trade routes; they went to war with the 
Trojans because they were thoroughly annoyed 
about the stealing of women." 

As soon as men began to build cities they began 

to build temples. Religion has been a vital part of 

civilisation since its beginning. Wells stresses this 

point and this is natural since his discovery that 

176 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

without religion and the vivifying power of religion 
civilisation must come to an end. The temple was 
first of all a place of worship but the temple festivals 
kept count of time. The priests were doctors and 
recorders and the temple was the home of what 
knowledge there was in the world. The power of 
the secular king was a later creation than the power 
of the priests. 

Very early in the history of civilisation, men were 
differentiated into classes, trade and usury came 
into existence, and a strong minded minority in 
each community began to batten on the labour of 
the less energetic and the less competent majority. 
The social evils, which Wells deplores, have had, 
as he shows, a very long history. They have existed 
practically as long as civilisation itself. 

Wells is emphatic in his testimony to the debt 
that mankind owes to the Jews. Jehovah may have 
started merely as a tribal deity, but the Hebrew 
prophets dreamed of "one God in all the world." 

From this time onward there runs through 
human thought, now weakly and obscurely, now 
gathering power, the idea of one rule in the 
world, and of a promise and possibility of an 
active and splendid peace and of happiness in 
human affairs. 

177 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

If from the Hebrew prophets comes the idea of 
one God, linking the races of men together in a 
common faith, from the Greek philosophers comes 
the inspiration to enquire, to wonder. "Never be- 
fore had man challenged his world and the way of 
life to which he found his birth had brought him. 
Never had he said before that he could alter his 
condition." 

The Greek was the father of science and, as such, 
Wells, the scientist, regards him with veneration. 
The Hebrew was the father of religion, and the 
World State, Wells's heaven on earth, must be 
created, if it is ever to be created, by the alliance 
of science and religion. 

The World State has its prototype in the Roman 
Empire which, at its zenith, embraced practically 
the whole of Western civilisation and in which every 
free citizen, whether he were a Jew or a Gaul, a 
Briton or a North African was a Roman citizen. 
Athens had anticipated Roman cosmopolitanism. 
The foreigner was treated in Athens exactly like 
a native. But Athens remained a city while the 
city of Rome became the centre of an Empire, 
within which there was but one law and no 
wars. 

Hilaire Belloc contends that the Roman Empire 
178 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

was never absolutely destroyed. Wells says that 
"the smashing of the Roman social and political 
structure was complete." 

The Church was to some extent the heir of the 
Empire. As it gradually extended its sway all 
over Europe, it created a link between the nations, 
and this universal Church was the constant pro- 
tector of the poor against the tyranny of princes 
and barons. But the Church never had the power 
of the Empire. Within the boundaries of the Em- 
pire there was constant peace. Within the bounda- 
ries of the nations calling themselves Christian and 
subject to the spiritual authority of Rome, there 
was never-ending war. 

Wells's story of the rise of Christianity is again 
characteristic. To him Jesus Christ is "a being, 
very human, very earnest and passionate, capable 
of swift anger. ... a person — to use a common 
phrase — of intense personal magnetism." His 
teaching struck at patriotism and at the bonds of 
family loyalty and "condemned all the gradations 
of the economic system, all private wealth and per- 
sonal advancement." His teaching, so Wells says, 
was political as well as moral and Wells adds that 
the most important historical aspect of His gospel 
is that it is practically identical with the teaching 
179 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

of Buddha and of the founders of the other great 
world religions. 

Saint Paul, a man of subtle intellect and con- 
siderable education (Sir Gilbert Murray says that 
his Greek was extremely good) , turned the doctrine 
of Jesus into a theological system, which was fur- 
ther developed in the first four centuries and was 
codified at the famous General Council at Nicasa. 

Thanks to Constantine, Christianity became the 
official religion of the Roman Empire and in the 
centuries that followed, the barbarian races also be- 
came Christian. But Wells says: "The history of 
Europe from the fifth century onward to the fif- 
teenth is very largely of the failure of this great 
idea of a Divine World Government to realise itself 
in practice." 

It is necessary to note here that Wells ignores 
the fact that the Christian Church was built round 
the Mystery of the Eucharist, and that in all the 
turmoils of the centuries this Mystery has been its 
great possession. To ignore this fact is obviously 
to be judging and estimating the Church from the 
outside and possibly to be blaming it for what it has 
never professed to be. 

To Wells the Dark Ages are very dark. 
Christianity, he tells us, was entirely corrupted in 
180 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

the seventh century when it was pitted against the 
new religion taught by Mohammed. In Wells's 
view Mohammed was an "evidently lustful and 
rather shifty leader. . . . vain, egotistical, tyran- 
nous, and a self -deceiver," not for a minute to be 
compared with Jesus of Nazareth. But "it is not 
always through sublime persons that great things 
come into human life." The strength of Moslem- 
ism is that it is a simple and understandable re- 
ligion. It has no theological elaborations, no 
sacrificial priesthood. Without ambiguous sym- 
bolism it preaches the existence of a God of 
righteousness with whose aid there might be created 
"a great and increasing brotherhood of trustworthy 
men on earth." 

From these quotations it will be seen that there 
are many points of resemblance between the religion 
of Mohammed as set out in the Koran and the re- 
ligion of H. G. Wells as set out in "God the 
Invisible King." 

Perhaps the most valuable characteristic of "The 
Outline of History" is the persistent endeavour to 
explain the links that have existed between the 
various peoples of the world in every era of its 
history. It is a matter of common knowledge that 
during the Dark Ages Greek culture travelled east- 
181 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

ward, that it reached the Arabs through the Syrians 
and the Persians, that it was brought westward to 
Spain by the Arabs and the Moors, and that from 
Spain it travelled to Northern Italy where Saint 
Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle with the help of 
Arab commentators. But the Arabs also brought 
westward many things that they had learned from 
the Indians and the Chinese including the manufac- 
ture of paper. It would have been no use Gutenberg 
inventing the art of printing if there had been no 
paper to print on, and it is interesting to know that 
Europe owed her paper to Eastern ingenuity and 
successful Moslem conquest. Without the Chinese 
and their paper there could have been no revival of 
learning in Europe. 

Wells realises the enormous historical importance 
of the First Crusade, if one regards history as the 
story of the human race rather than the mere record 
of the achievements of the outstanding men of each 
generation. He says perfectly truly that in the 
First Crusade "we discover for the first time 
Europe with an idea and a soul." 

Rather oddly, Wells does not emphasise the ob- 
vious fact that the Reformation destroyed the unity 
of the Western world. Whatever good things the 
Reformation may have brought with it, it took 
182 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

away the one binding link between the European 
peoples — their common submission to the spiritual 
power of Rome. 

In so far, too, as the Reformation was official, as 
it was in England and Germany, and the local 
Prince replaced the Pope as the head of the local 
church, the Reformation was definitely reactionary. 
Wells quotes Mr. Ernest Barker who points out 
that the Catholic and the Calvinist were both demo- 
cratic, while the Lutheran and the Anglican were 
both monarchic and aristocratic. 

The great intellectual activity of the Renaissance 
was accompanied by a "definite drift towards 
Machiavellian monarchy," towards separatism and 
autocratic power. Something like Wells's World 
State had existed so long as the Roman Empire 
endured. The scheme of a World State was in 
existence so long as the whole of Europe lived in 
submission to the Pope. With the Renaissance 
and the Reformation and the consequent funda- 
mental religious and national differences, came the 
beginning of the Great Powers, the scramble 
for overseas Empire, perpetual quarrels between 
princes and peoples, almost ceaseless war and the 
entire loss for the time of the international idea. 

Looking at history from the point of view of this 
183 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

statement, it may be said that the historical epoch 
that began with the Reformation certainly lasted 
until the Great War and that there is very little 
reason to hope that it has yet come to an end. 

I imagine that the happiness of the common 
people during the Middle Ages has been consider- 
ably exaggerated by enthusiastic medievalists like 
William Morris. Wells says that in England the 
poorer sort of man was leading an endurable exist- 
ence until the beginning of the eighteenth century. 
The destruction of the Monasteries, Vagrancy Acts 
and the stealing of the common land had all added 
to the hardship of life for the poor in England 
while on the continent the farmer of taxes made life 
terribly hard. But, while from the Reformation 
till the end of the eighteenth century, the governing 
minority was not in the least concerned with the 
happiness of the toiling majority, life for the ma- 
jority did not become sordid and hideous until the 
beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 

Our modern world was born with the beginning 
of industrialism, the creation of the American Re- 
public and the French Revolution. Industrialism 
compelled the majority to become what Socialists 
call wage slaves. The United States has been for 
over a century an object lesson to the world of a 
184 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

great nation covering a continent, made up of men 
of practically all races, developing a vehement 
patriotism without king or aristocracy, and offering 
(unhappily with some reservation) equal oppor- 
tunities to all its citizens. 

The French Revolution, founded on the Rights 
of Man, was international. In the first enthusiasm 
of the Revolution any man who loved freedom was 
accepted as a French citizen and this international 
tradition was inherited by Karl Marx and now is a 
characteristic of the Labour and Socialist move- 
ment. 

As Wells points out, the difference between wage 
earners steadily decreased during the nineteenth 
century and "a sense of solidarity between all sorts 
of poor and propertyless men, as against the 
profit-amassing and wealth-concentrated class is 
growing more and more evident in our world." 
The solidarity is not yet however really inter- 
national. 

The fall of Napoleon was followed by another 
hundred years of great powers intriguing against 
each other and these intrigues finally led to the 
holocaust of the Great War. 

Wells's attitude to the great men of history is 
extremely interesting. For example: 
185 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

There was in Alexander the Great knowledge 
and imagination, power and opportunity, folly, 
egotism, detestable vulgarity, and an immense 
promise broken by the accident of early death. 

Csesar's record of vulgar scheming for the 
tawdriest mockeries of personal worship is a 
silly and shameful record; it is incompatible 
with the idea that he was a wise and wonderful 
superman setting the world to rights. 

The figure he (Napoleon) makes in history 
is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of van- 
ity, greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and 
disregard of all who trusted him and of a 
grandiose apeing of Ceesar, Alexander and 
Charlemagne, which would be purely comic if 
it were not caked over with human blood. 

Wells's view of Ceesar and Napoleon seems to 
me partial and wrong. I have already attempted 
in another place and at some length to controvert 
his picture of Napoleon, but the prejudice that in- 
spires the caricature is a vital part of the man. 
To Wells, the autocrat and the great conqueror 
have invariably contrived misery for the mass of the 
people. They have waged unnecessary wars. They 
have caused unnecessary death, they have been re- 
sponsible for unnecessary sorrow. It is ridiculous 
for one man to have the power of life and death 
186 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

over hundreds of thousands of other men. It is 
unsafe. It must lead to disaster. The autocratic 
institution is intensely foolish and is certain to lead 
to the waste that Wells hates from the bottom of his 
soul. 

It is difficult for him to conceive a good autocrat 
and he seems unable to appreciate the extraordi- 
nary qualities both of intellect and character that 
made it possible for a man like Napoleon, born of 
the humblest parentage, to make himself the master 
of the western world. He almost entirely ignores 
the good that Napoleon did for Europe. He criti- 
cises the Code Napoleon and suggests that Napo- 
leon himself had very little to do with drawing 
it up. He practically ignores the fact, that be- 
fore the Revolution, there was no real law in 
France to which the poor man could appeal, that, 
during the Revolution, there was a hectic en- 
thusiasm for law making with a resultant confusion 
and uncertainty and that the Code Napoleon for 
the first time gave one law to the whole of France 
and thus gave the people a measure of security and 
justice. 

Wells does not seem to realise the part that the 
superman sometimes plays in the progress of the 
race. If Cromwell was the Hammer of the Lord, 
187 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

Napoleon was the Hammer of the Revolution. The 
soldiers of the Napoleonic armies carried the prin- 
ciples of the Revolution into all the countries that 
they invaded and, nearly everywhere, the invasions 
meant the end of Feudalism. 

I do not ignore the evil that the great man has 
often wrought. I am as suspicious as Wells of all 
dictators whether they are hereditary or whether 
they have gained their places by successful politi- 
cal intrigue. But it is idle to ignore the fact that 
great place cannot be won without great qualities, 
and that at certain crises in the world's history, the 
one great man — often entirely selfish and unscru- 
pulous — may, without the least intention, be of 
incalculable value in the human pilgrimage towards 
happiness. 

At the end of "The Outline of History" Wells 
is once more optimistic. He finds a new sanity in 
the world. "Brotherhood through sorrow, sorrow 
for common sufferings and for irreparable mutual 
injuries is spreading and increasing throughout the 
world." The ordinary man will, I fear, find little 
evidence of the growth of this brotherhood. 

Our true nationality, says Wells, is mankind, but 
the war has served to accentuate the fierceness of 
parochial nationality. Never were Frenchmen 
188 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

more fiercely French. Never were Germans more 
determinedly German. New nationalities and new 
patriotisms have been added to the welter. The 
Yugo Slav can now for the first time be fiercely 
Yugo Slavic while the Irish have successfully 
worked out the policy summarised in their motto 
"Ourselves Alone." 

It is true that the next war, if it ever occurs, will 
bring with it almost unthinkable horrors. Wells 
is perfectly right continually to insist on this fact. 
It is true that the common people in every country 
would be horrified if they heard that another great 
war had commenced. But in no country in the 
world have the common people any real power to 
decide whether there shall be peace or war, and in 
nearly every country in the world, statesmen still 
pursue the narrow-visioned nationalistic policy 
which made the last war and must, if it be ob- 
stinately pursued, make another. 

It is true too that the Great War has left Europe 
bankrupt, that the standard of comfort has fallen, 
that unemployment is chronic, that the credit of the 
most prosperous powers is in peril. 

The amazing thing is that this condition of af- 
fairs is accepted with comparative indifference. 
Statesmen make warning speeches. International 
189 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

conferences are held almost every month, but noth- 
ing fundamental is ever done. No one has courage 
enough to suggest the revolutionary changes that 
are obviously necessary if worse ill is not to befall 
the world. There is not the smallest sign that either 
kings or statesmen or parliaments or peoples have 
really grasped the Wells idea that Western civili- 
sation must be destroyed without the creation of a 
world order and one universal law of justice. 

It is clear to me that little can be expected dur- 
ing the present generation. The best that one can 
hope is that the world has become too impoverished 
to make another war possible for at least another 
fifty years. By that time education may have done 
its work and it will have the better chance of con- 
triving salvation the more Wells's "Outline of His- 
tory" is put into the hands of the young. 

Hilaire Belloc refers to the "Outline" as "not an 
example of great weight nor likely to endure for 
long." This is the voice of prejudice. The "Out- 
line" is an amazing achievement, the work of a great 
and courageous writer inspired with a high ideal 
and equipped with amazing knowledge. 

Human history, Wells says, becomes more and 
more a race between education and catastrophe. He 
admits that catastrophe has sometimes won. It 
190 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

seems to me that catastrophe has nearly always 
won. Education had its day in Greece and the 
power of the Greek cities passed away into semi- 
barbarism. The Roman Empire educated the 
peoples of Europe in unity and respect for the law, 
and the Roman Empire was destroyed. The Chris- 
tian Church offered the peoples a mystic unity, and 
the peoples rejected it. The story of the nineteenth 
century is one long story of growing prosperity 
and increasing knowledge and the story ended with 
the Great War. Great indeed must be the faith of 
the man fully conscious of all the failures who can 
finish his "Outline" with this great profession: 

Gathered together at last under the leadership 
of man, the student teacher of the universe, 
unified, disciplined, armed with secret powers 
of the atom and with knowledge as yet beyond 
dreaming, Life for ever dying to be born afresh, 
for ever young and eager, will presently stand 
upon this earth as upon a foot-stool, and stretch 
out its realm amidst the stars. 



191 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 

"I would rather be called a journalist than an 
artist." This admission has occurred over and over 
again in my mind as I have been writing this book. 
It may happen (heaven forbid that I should say 
that it has often happened) that a man may be 
both a journalist and a literary artist. But in this 
confession written by Wells to Henry James, he 
was deliberately, and I think truthfully, "placing" 
himself. A journalist is necessarily closely in touch 
with the mind of his own day. He feels the changes 
of atmosphere. He is acutely affected by his 
fellows. 

Mr. H. L. Mencken says: "He (Wells) seems to 
respond to all the varying crazes and fallacies of 
the day ; he swallows them without digesting them ; 
he tries to substitute mere timeliness for reflection 
and feeling." 

The most cursory study of Wells's books is a 
sufficient refutation of Mr. Mencken's criticism. 
Wells certainly has responded to the intellectual 
192 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

movements of his age, possibly to its crazes and 
fallacies, if Socialism be regarded as a craze and 
the possibility of perpetual peace a fallacy. It may 
perhaps be said too that Wells swallowed Fabian 
Socialism. He most certainly was unable to digest 
it. One might continue the imagery to its coarse 
conclusion. Further thought and examination 
caused him to reject the Socialist theory of social 
betterment so far as it implied bureaucratic inter- 
ference with individual liberty. But, as I have 
shown, this phase, like every other phase of Wells's 
experience, has been part of a sane and logical 
progression. 

The charge that he has substituted "mere timeli- 
ness for reflection and feeling" is eminently unfair. 
Wells has the journalistic faculty for being up-to- 
date, for dealing with actual problems and actual 
social conditions. But it is impossible to read "Love 
and Mr. Lewisham" and then to say that the book 
was written by a man who has never considered 
the consequences of indifferent education and fool- 
ish early marriages, it is impossible to read "Tono- 
Bungay" and then to assert that its author has not 
fully considered, from his own point of view, the 
social effects of existing commercial conditions; it 
is impossible to read "The New Machiavelli" with- 
J 3 193 



AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

out being impressed by the fact that its author has 
very carefully and very honestly considered the 
eternal problem of the human triangle ; it is impos- 
sible to read "Mr. Britling Sees it Through" with- 
out realising that the book is the work of a man of 
acute intelligence and feeling carefully recording 
the impressions made on his own mind and soul by 
the events of the war; it is impossible, whatever 
may be one's own opinions, to read "God the In- 
visible King" without being impressed by its 
sincerity and its individual honesty. 

In one respect, Mr. Mencken is quite right. It 
has never been enough for Wells "to display the 
life of his time with accuracy and understanding." 
He has always been eager to set things right. That 
may be, as Mr. Mencken says, "a fatuous yearn- 
ing," a sinister impulse, "as aberrant in an artist as 
a taste for legs in an Archbishop." But it is the 
impulse that has always been there. Wells has 
never made the smallest attempt to hide it. From 
the beginning, he has had a gospel to preach and he 
has always been determined to preach it. He is 
not in the least upset by the charge that he has gone 
outside "the business of an artist." He does not 
ask to be regarded as an artist. If he be an artist, 
as even Mr. Mencken admits he is in the best of his 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

novels, then he is an artist malgre lui. In this he is 
unique among great writers. Nine-tenths of the 
writers of fine fiction would I suppose agree with 
Henry James's statement: "I hold that interest 
may be, must be exquisitely made and created." 

Wells does not create his interest by mere stri- 
dency in the manner of the writer of newspaper 
head-lines. He creates it by sheer power. He 
writes emphatically, simply, intensely. There is no 
conscious attempt to reach beauty or exquisiteness. 

Wells is unquestionably what Mr. Mencken has 
called him, and as I have tried to show him, "a true 
proletarian." Mr. Mencken has nothing but scorn 
for the proletarian, an unlucky creature "born with 
morals, faiths, certainties, vasty gaseous hopes." 
But perhaps morals and faiths and certainties are 
not altogether undesirable possessions, and it may 
be better for a man to have gaseous hope than no 
hope at all. 

Anyway, Wells has all these things. He cer- 
tainly believes that a novel, like every other human 
achievement, must have a moral significance. He 
has always been a man of faith, though his faith has 
developed with the years and has suffered funda- 
mental change. He clings to the certainty of the 
ultimate creation of a finer and happier human 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

society, despite all the discouraging phenomena of 
his own day. 

This is the finest of all his characteristics. He 
realises clearly enough the obstinate continuance of 
inefficiency and folly. He realises, perhaps more 
clearly than any other living man, the ultimate de- 
struction that must occur if inefficiency and folly 
are not destroyed. Yet he looks ahead and still has 
hope, "vasty gaseous hope," if Mr. Mencken prefers 
it. 

It has been well said that Wells simply does not 
know how to be dull. Even at his worst, he is read- 
able, and this is a genuine tribute to the fascination 
of his personality because he has constantly re- 
peated himself, and it is only from the most talented 
that we are content to listen to the old, old story. 

Wells is amazingly prolific and, apart altogether 
from his scorn of art for art's sake, he has obviously 
written far too much to write conspicuously well. 
He is always in a hurry, as a journalist must be. 
The leading article apropos on Tuesday is out of 
date on Wednesday. Wells has the same feeling 
about his books. A book, suggested by the situation 
existing this year, will be dated next year, will cease 
to have its value as a human document if it is not 
produced amid the circumstances that have sug- 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

gested it to tne author's mind. "Do it now" might 
well be the Wells family motto. 

The fact that Wells is a combination of scientist, 
reformer and artist despite himself, sometimes leads 
to curious results. He is a born story teller and 
now and again he has broken away from the realism 
of a novel for the sake of telling a fantastic yarn. 
The most striking instance of this is the concluding 
part of "Marriage" in which for entirely insufficient 
reasons, he sends Trafford and Marjorie off to 
Labrador. Another example is the irrelevant 
search for "quap" in "Tono-Bungay." 

These break-aways are the inevitable result of 
versatility. Only a man, capable of the most severe 
self-discipline, can prevent himself from doing 
everything that he feels he can do well. It some- 
times seems to me that Wells gets a little bored be- 
fore he gets to the end of a long book. His master- 
piece "The History of Mr. Polly" is very short, but 
it must be added in justice that his longest work 
"The Outline of History" is written with red hot 
enthusiasm from the first page to the last. But in 
the last chapters of "Tono-Bungay" there is a 
definite suggestion that the author is growing tired 
and that he is looking forward eagerly to writing 
the last paragraph. And after reading "Marriage" 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

one feels that two-thirds through the book Wells 
must have said to himself: "I have written about 
this husband and wife business before, the whole 
thing is growing terribly tiresome, suppose I finish 
the book with a rattling adventure, dropping the 
philosopher for the time and showing that I can 
beat Conan Doyle at his own game !" And he did. 

In their series of essays "Some Modern Novel- 
ists," Helen Thomas Follet and Wilson Follet 
say of Wells: "The net result of his writings must 
be we should think to set the individual reader to 
examining his own heart, scouring his own motives 
and sparing insincerity in himself no more than he 
spares it in his neighbours; setting a standard for 
his moral life and then living toward it even at some 
cost to his bodily comfort and with some sacrifice 
of the approval of others." I do not know whether 
the Wells writings do actually have this effect. I 
fear that it is unlikely. But it is certain that they 
are intended to have this effect. They are intended 
as an incitement to service and there can be no 
service without a certain measure of sacrifice. 

The call to the individual has become louder and 
more insistent as book has succeeded book. In 
Wells's early writings, it is Society that is ar- 
raigned. Society is responsible for waste and avoid- 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

able unhappiness. Then Wells gradually began to 
realise that there can be no fundamental improve- 
ment in Society without fundamental changes in 
the individuals who make up Society. Mr. Polly 
is the victim of inane social conditions, but after 
fifteen years submission, Mr. Polly finds the cour- 
age to fight against social conditions. He experi- 
ences a change of heart. He is converted from a 
slave to a rebel and the consequence is that he is 
able to find for himself happiness and content. 

Then the perplexing problem had to be faced as 
to how any sort of a general conversion can be 
brought about, how not one odd individual but the 
mass of men can find the courage to fight life and to 
gain satisfaction. The consideration of this pro- 
blem compelled Wells to the conviction of the 
existence of God, his God of the Human Heart, 
without whom there can be not only no victory, but 
not even a fight. So the Wells faith gradually 
evolved. 

Given a sufficient number of men conscious of the 
inspiration and assistance of God, the old order 
with its cruelty and its futility and its waste may 
be destroyed and all things may be made new. But 
God helps those who help themselves. The World 
State can only be reached by education, by truer 
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AN OUTLINE OF WELLS 

and fuller knowledge, by a new basis of thought 
which will overthrow parochial and national bound- 
aries and will regard mankind as a whole, equally 
the children of God, equally the heirs of His 
Kingdom. 

It is easy to sneer at the Wells gospel as fatuous. 
It may well be that it is inferior to the old gospels. 
I am certainly not inclined to discuss its intrinsic 
value. I have merely endeavoured to summarise and 
explain its tenets. The point of outstanding in- 
terest and importance is that this little volcano of a 
man with the strength and the limitations of his 
class, its amazing and sometimes coarse candour, 
its sentimentality and its morals, this man who has 
been described as the greatest intellectual force in 
the English-speaking world, should have given the 
best years of his life to preaching a gospel at all 
and should have insisted on the necessity for men to 
be mystically guided and inspired. 

When Mr. Wells found God, the age of material- 
ism definitely came to an end. 



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